Louis Michael Spadaro, Ph.D., the founding dean of the Fordham University Graduate School of Business Administration, died on May 3 at his home in Syracuse, N.Y. He was 94.

Spadaro, a New York City native, joined the Fordham faculty in 1939, and as professor and dean he founded the Graduate School of Business Administration at Lincoln Center.

"Dr. Spadaro pioneered the first years of the Graduate School of Business Administration, and his legacy lives on in the achievements of our students, the success of our faculty and the growth of our programs and global reach," said GBA Dean Howard P. Tuckman, Ph.D.

Spadaro was an alumnus of City College of New York and New York University, where he earned his doctorate in economics and became part of the Austrian School of Economics, a movement that included notable free-market libertarian theorists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Hans Sennholz and Murray Rothbard.

Spadaro edited New Directions in Austrian Economics.

What has overtaken America's working people is not a natural disaster like "globalization," and not even some kind of societal atavism in which countries regress mysteriously to their 19th-century selves. This is a man-made catastrophe, a result that proceeded directly from the deliberate beatdown of organized labor and the wrecking of the liberal state.

It is, in other words, a political disaster, with tax cuts, trade agreements, deregulatory measures, and enforcement decisions all finely crafted to benefit one part of society and leave the rest behind. Few of the voters who gave Ronald Reagan his landslide victories, it is fair to say, intended for this to be the outcome. They wanted their country to stand tall again, certainly; they wanted the scary regulators off their backs, maybe; but I can recall no conservative who trumpeted those long-ago elections - or any of the succeeding contests, for that matter - as a referendum on plutocracy.

So let us have one now. Instead of pleasant talk about "change" and feats of beer drinking at the corner tavern, let us hear our candidates address this greatest issue of them all: What kind of country are we to be? A land of equality? Or a bankers' utopia - where the law of the land has achieved mystical oneness with the higher law of classical economics, and devil take the bottom 80%.

So far as I can tell, the calamity discussed here owes entirely to the one statistic he thinks proves his case: the real hourly wages in the US for most workers has risen only 1% since 1979, where as the richest 20% of the country made more than the rest of the country combined. But perhaps we should consider how much less wages would have risen had the rich not permitted to become so, or maybe this is due not to the merciful loss of union's grip on the economy but rather to such forces as inflation. And as for the supposed dismantling of the interventionist state and the "tax cuts" and de-regulation, well, I guess people are just happy to make up the reality that they want to see.

It's true that the government policy is configured to help the rich and powerful of course but it is hard to see how putting government even more in charge of our economic lives is going to fix that. .

With time rightly identified as a scarce resource, economic theory is needed to understand the interchange process. And there is no place for the "freeconomics" of Chris Anderson. FULL ARTICLE

Regardless, here it is. Enjoy. Cordray knew you would.

Thankfully, my mother lives in Florida and is unaware of Cordray trumping my measly gift. Well, at least I paid for mine.

Hey, wait a minute, I paid for both!

May 8, 2008

Gift to Ohio Moms: Tools for Financial Security

Columbus, Ohio

As Ohio families recognize Mother's Day this weekend, Ohio Treasurer Richard Cordray is trying something new to encourage those moms in their quest for financial security.

The Treasurer's office will make available online its newly-revised Women & Money 2008 Workbook, from Saturday, May 10 through Saturday, May 17. The workbook contains information on a wide variety of personal finance topics and is used as part of the office's annual Women & Money free financial workshops held during the summer. The Workbook is usually distributed only at the workshops.

Continue reading (keep in mind that this gift from the state is only available for a short time)

Oil is too global a commodity for speculators to determine its price. We know, for instance, that oil prices are high not only in spot markets but in futures markets, not only on the Nymex but in the UK (Brent), Dubai, Malaysia, and numerous smaller, less liquid markets not accessible to speculators. Are we to believe that the conspirators somehow entered all these markets at once?

The argument for speculation also ignores the fact that numerous other commodities are soaring in price, namely gold, silver, platinum, palladium, copper, iron ore, tin, corn, rice, etc, etc. Did the oil conspirators cause all that, too? The commodities that do not trade on futures exchanges (making them less susceptible to speculation) have risen slightly more than exchange traded commodities, indicating that fundamentals are driving prices higher.

The House show trial is surely designed to bamboozle the general public. The one entity that engages in activities directly linked to the scarcity of oil vis a vis dollars, the Federal Reserve, appears to be exempt from government scrutiny.

This afternoon as a few funnel clouds were forming miles from my house, I received a call from my mother living in Florida. Seems she was not about to wait for her son to make his yearly Mother's Day call as she had urgent news. CNN and other news outlets were reporting funnel clouds and tornados in central Ohio, with my county noted as a likely target. This was sometime before 2:00. I turned on the TV and hit the web for detailed updates. Luckily, the storms passed overhead without even a significant touchdown.

With the menace long gone, I received another phone call; an automated call from the county 911 department notifying me of the tornado warning. This was 2:25, with the warning to expire at 2:30. And, more importantly, with the storms no longer in the county or even a threat to adjoining counties.

Then I learned that Franklin County -- just to my south -- also had a delayed tornado warning because "Franklin County EMA deputy director Jim Leonard said the communications room is not manned during weekends and holidays, but there are two people on-call at all times."

Do I complain to management? No way. Those folks are looking for complaints as a means to justify additional funding. Do I keep my mother happy? You bet! Her warning was neither delayed nor costly.

Remember mom, and not just on Mother's Day.

A sensation when it was unveiled at the London School of Economics in 1949, the Phillips machine used hydraulics to model the workings of the British economy but now looks, at first glance, like the brainchild of a nutty professor. Where the Bank's team of in-house economists are equipped with state-of- the-art digital computers, the profession's first stab at modelling was very much a do-it-yourself affair with a whiff of the Heath Robinson about it.

The prototype was an odd assortment of tanks, pipes, sluices and valves, with water pumped around the machine by a motor cannibalised from the windscreen wiper of a Lancaster bomber. Bits of filed-down Perspex and fishing line were used to channel the coloured dyes that mimicked the flow of income round the economy into consumer spending, taxes, investment and exports. Phillips and Walter Newlyn, who helped piece the machine together at the end of the 1940s, experimented with treacle and methylated spirits before deciding that coloured water was the best way of displaying the way money circulates around the economy.

But whoops:

By today's standards, the Phillips machine was limited. It made no provision for inflation and, with capital controls in force, had no need to take account of the curse of the modern UK economy - the wild swings in the credit cycle. Professor Brian Henry, a visiting fellow at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, said: "It was a child of its time. It looked at how the economy could be stabilised when people were worried about the stabilisation of aggregate demand. That is the way things were in the 1950s.

"Things are different now. There is a different financial system and a completely different global economy. But Phillips was a brilliant guy. He came up with interesting ways of providing practical advice on policy."

Even so, Henry says the machine is far more than a museum piece. Today the Bank of England's models are supposed to show how shocks affect the economy and the time it takes for a change in policy to have an effect, precisely the sort of problems that the Phillips machine helped identify. Even with the most up-to-date computers, the Bank is still finding it hard to come up with the right answers.

Indeed, one early demonstration of the machine displayed the difficulties that can arise when monetary and fiscal policy are not synchronised. Phillips asked one of his students to be chancellor of the exchequer and control taxes and spending; the other to be governor of the Bank and control interest rates. Predictably, the policies were uncoordinated and the upshot was that water overflowed on to the floor.

We can't argue with the instruction here, or the sentiment behind it. There is nothing wrong with giving and sacrifice. My argument is with the choice of language. It contains a word and three phrases the common usage of which can be highly misleading. FULL ARTICLE