Should Germany Prop Up the E.U.'s Southern States?

In April 2013, Deutsche Welle reported that the German central bank had “analyzed possible effect a domestic growth package could have on southern European economies. ‘By and large, it would have no impact,’ claimed Clemens Fuest, president of the Mannheim-based Center for European Economic Research. ‘We won't be able to fight recession in southern Europe with domestic growth incentives.’ He added that southern European states do not just have a demand problem. ‘Prices there have got out of hand,’ he said. ‘Wages and labor costs have spiraled out of control, and must be brought down again. If you were to implement a growth scheme, you'd only slow down the necessary adjustments.’”

The full essay is at Essays on the E.U. Political Economy: Federalism and the Debt Crisis, available at Amazon.

States Move Beyond Congress on Gun Control

On April 4, 2013, the government of Connecticut passed “a sweeping new set of gun control reforms.” Colorado and New York had already passed their respective versions of “sweeping gun legislation,” all in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut the previous December. 

The complete essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires.

Bad Directors at HP: Like Guests Who Overstay?

Lest it be thought that Congress ignoring the business lobby would result in laws capable of reforming corporate governance in the U.S. in the interest of stockholders, even putting the “objectionable” stuff back into legislation may not be sufficient. In this essay, I look at the proposed elimination of plurality voting in the original Dodd-Frank bill from the perspective of the case of HP. Put simply, the question is whether it would have made any difference had the proposal been retained in the bill.


The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.