Peter Schiff was wrong.

Austrians are political hacks. They are to economics what intelligent design is to biology; a science built around the central preconceived notion.

Milton Friedman himself said "The Hayek-Mises explanation of the business cycle is contradicted by the evidence. It is, I believe, false."

As opposed to Peter Schiff, Paul Krugman really did call it on our current crisis. And he's got a Nobel prize. Before either of those things happened, he raised his own questions about the Austrian explanation for unemployment.

I think the most damning argument against ABCT is this one. My own paraphrase is this: if central banks are creating/worsening booms and busts by surprising the market, why isn't the market getting smarter about predicting its behavior? It's not like the Fed rates are done at random and in secret. They even tell us what their essential policy algorithm is.

I tend to think Brad DeLong makes a lot more sense than other economists. He doesn't seem wed to any particular school's mindset, and spends a lot of time comparing theory to data and questioning the theory when it doesn't match the observations (something I never see Austrians do).

The more I've read of the different economic theories and the unfolding conversations between the mainstream economists, the more I think they're all starting to realize their models are broken in some subtle but profound way. (Except the Austrians, who don't make falsifiable predictions, and thusly see vindication in every squiggle of the market.)

Behavioral economics seems to be the next Big Idea in economics, but I've not seen anyone try to incorporate that into their models in any meaningful way. For now I'm with direpickle and ponceleon; all economic predictions are the result of an imprecise voodoo dance, and anyone who claims certainty should be viewed with deep suspicion.

This is supposed to be the actual "hidden" word, but a dozen combinations of any of those squiggles could be construed as the F word. I think it's much ado about nothing.

That confirms my theory about all this power going to Dag's head. But as every married man knows it's really Persephone who pulls the strings. And siftbot spelled backwards is tobtfis. Which is a nickname that Deathcow had in elementary school. And since Dag and Deathcow used to be classmates that means there in cahoots with one another. And if you break down Deathcow it becomes two words Death and Cow. Not take out the first vowel and it becomes Dath Cow. Remove the th and it becomes Da Cow. Now if you write cow vertically and kind of squiggle it it becomes Da g. Now put it together DAG! So Dag is Deathcow, siftbot, and Dag.

Now break down Persephone phonetically Per-sef-oni. Now take the fist one, the 'P' if you reverse it becomes a 9 and the f and i at the end of the other two are tall letters and if you squint just right they look like 1's. So together it's 9-1-1. Or 9/11. Therefore through reason and logic Dag and Persephone are behind 9/11.

Look at it people! The facts all add up! You can't poke holes in a theory that solid!

Hahaha - Wow. Now I feel incredibly stupid. The really funny part is that I have a spell checker installed for Firefox, so all entry fields are checked automatically. Must have been all the 'c' and 'u' and 'no' that threw me off. Damn red squiggles.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Nice links DD - how about a Jackson Pollock sifter? Of course it would be just a bunch of blue squiggles.

Totally intentional. There's no audio. You can barely make out the squiggles getting it on. If a coworker walked past your desk, I doubt they'd see anything but a talking head.