The Open Market Blog

• By: Cord Blomquist
• 10/02/2008

View my page on Bureaucrash Social Bureaucrash, the activist arm of CEI, has started a new social network called, you guess it:…

• By: Gary Howard
• 10/02/2008

As yesterday’s New York Times reports. Lost in the universal focus on the credit crisis, we have seen a somewhat troubling…

• By: Eli Lehrer
• 09/30/2008

Borrowers who put less than 20 percent of a home’s value down for a mortgage almost always have to secure “private mortgage insurance” (PMI) to…

• By: Cord Blomquist
• 09/29/2008

LibertyWeek, CEI’s weekly podcast, covered the bailout and the financial meltdown on Wall Street in its last episode.  “Bailouts & Ballparks” features an interview…

• By: Hans Bader
• 09/28/2008

Liberal Congressional leaders have apparently reached a deal with the Bush Administration on the principal elements of a $700 billion bailout of the financial system.  What this…

• By: Hans Bader
• 09/28/2008

Washington Mutual went under this week in the nation’s biggest bank failure ever.  But not before putting out a final press release touting its devotion to…

• By: Hans Bader
• 09/27/2008

The bailout bill drafted by liberal Congressional leaders contains a massive slush fund that will benefit the fraud-ridden left-wing group ACORN, which must be removed, argues Investors…

• By: Iain Murray
• 09/26/2008

The glee in European capitals at the woes of “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism is tangible. Sarkozy and the German finance minister pile on, with Sarkozy saying,…

• By: Gary Howard
• 09/23/2008

Time magazine contributors Andy Serwer and Allan Sloan give us an article in the latest issue meant to explain…

• By: Hans Bader
• 09/23/2008

Treasury Secretary Paulson wants the American people to fork over $700 billion to bail out Wall Street, even though he admits that his…

• By: Julie Walsh
• 09/23/2008

I followed a link from one of Hans’ posts and found this must-read WSJ article by a former chairman of FDIC–“How to Save the…

• By: Fred L. Smith, Jr.
• 09/23/2008

These are troubled times for the global economy.  However, we’re working to clarify that the failure is not the market—nor, indeed, even in the most…

• By: Iain Murray
• 09/22/2008

Best short explanation of the mark-to-markets issue I have yet seen: Imagine if you had a $200,000 mortgage on a $300,000 house that you…

• By: Hans Bader
• 09/20/2008

Bush is seeking $700 billion to buy "bad mortgages" in the largest bailout in history.  The proposal attempts to bail out the entire financial system, rather than individual…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 09/19/2008

In his Examiner column today, former CEI Brookes Fellow Tim Carney explodes the myth of AIG as a stalwart defender of free markets that…

• By: Iain Murray
• 09/18/2008

With the British financial markets in meltdown, most of the blame has attached to speculators. In a desperate attempt to be seen to be doing…

• By: Richard Morrison
• 09/17/2008

Some people seem to think that having a mind for business and profit means you must be some kind of money-grubbing miser. Far from it,…

• By: Cord Blomquist
• 09/16/2008

Check out me and Richard Morrison doing another episode of CEI’s weekly podcast, Liberty Week.  This week we cover: The “meltdown” on Wall Street…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 09/15/2008

Toronto city officials are considering some drastic measures to tackle what they see as a crisis of mounting piles of garbage. Reports the Toronto…

• By: Eli Lehrer
• 09/15/2008

Unfortunately, Congress needs to renew the National Flood Insurance Program sometime in the next few weeks. Right now, the program provides the only flood coverage…

• By: John Berlau
• 09/15/2008

The weeks leading up to a Presidential election have always been called the "silly season." But the attacks from bloggers and the media on vice-presidential…

• By: Cord Blomquist
• 09/12/2008

Rad Berky of NewsChannel 36 in Charlotte, North Carolina reports that fears of Hurricane Ike disrupting the supply of gasoline has…

• By: Hans Bader
• 09/12/2008

On the front page of the Washington Post, writer Steven Pearlstein contradicts himself by writing that mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are being…

• By: Hans Bader
• 09/11/2008

The Religious Left seeks to impose its authoritarian social agenda through lawsuits and other means.  They love speech codes, despite the fact that they are often…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 09/11/2008

…looks very different than it does in the United States. And by Miller, I mean Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.). In 2001, Rep. Miller and several…

• By: Iain Murray
• 09/11/2008

This summer has made it quite clear that the US is suffering an energy crisis. Not a great one yet, but definitely a harbinger of…

• By: Gary Howard
• 09/11/2008

As we learn from a Portfolio.com story by Zubin Jelveh, more erroneous proclamations about how horrible WalMart is for society have…

• By: Hans Bader
• 09/11/2008

Public employee unions make the false claim that public employees are underpaid and undercompensated.  But the reality is just the opposite.  Not only are public employees…

• By: Julie Walsh
• 09/10/2008

The presidential election is in a dead heat, so every vote counts. Yet ACORN wants some votes to count more than once. The Association of…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 09/09/2008

Shopfloor.org draws a stark contrast between The New York Times‘s stated position on unions for other employers, and its own laying off…

• By: Hans Bader
• 09/09/2008

Right now, the federal government, at a huge cost to taxpayers of perhaps $100 billion, is bailing out the two government-backed mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac…

• By: Hans Bader
• 09/08/2008

In California, where a referendum legalized medical marijuana, the state legislature has now gone much further and passed a bill, AB 2279, that would force…

• By: John Berlau
• 09/08/2008

There are many words -- and most them not nice -- to describe the new government conservatorship and planned bailout of Fannie Mae and…

• By: Hans Bader
• 09/06/2008

When Congress authorized a taxpayer bailout of government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, supporters claimed that the mere authorization of a bailout would…

• By: Hans Bader
• 09/06/2008

Congressional leaders want yet more budget-busting, deficit-expanding “stimulus” packages, using the slow economy as an excuse for proposals to bail out state governments…

• By: John Berlau
• 09/05/2008

As Open Market readers know, the Competitive Enterprise Institute recently helped achieve a very significant victory wrapped within a defeat at the DC Circuit Court…

• By: Hans Bader
• 09/04/2008

Inflation is now a bigger economic problem than unemployment, argues the Wall Street Journal, and is a bigger concern to voters, too.  The Fed…

• By: Richard Morrison
• 09/04/2008

It’s official – Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has admitted to lying under oath and will be resigning within the next 14 days. Mr. Kilpatrick,…

• By: Hans Bader
• 09/03/2008

The Justice Department is proposing 1,000 pages of new “guidance” expanding the reach of the Americans with Disabilities Act, at an estimated cost of $23 billion…

• By: Hans Bader
• 09/03/2008

Earlier, I and Alex Harris criticized the Agriculture Department for banning a company from testing for mad cow disease.  The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 09/03/2008

Cuba punk rock musician Gorki Aguila Carrasco was spared jail this week, after the Cuban government arrested him on the ridiculous charge of “…

• By: Eli Lehrer
• 09/02/2008

P. Diddy, one of my heroes, has announced that he wants to bring down gas prices so he can fly coast to coast on…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 09/01/2008

Sorry about that!  That’s the British government’s reaction to the two-year delay in approving a drug that combats blindness.  Too expensive, dear chap … anyway,…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 08/30/2008

The consume’rs right to know. It’s hard to disagree with the nanny-state proposal now before the California legislature (I know, I know … what nanny-state…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 08/29/2008

Today, in time for Labor Day weekend, I’ve got two new articles out on current goings-on in organized labor. In The American Spectator, my…

• By: Gary Howard
• 08/28/2008

Today in the WaPo we see that plans by the University of Chicago to establish a research institute named after the late Nobel prize-winning…