Matters Financial

4 August 2003


Terror Futures Market Killed Off
The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) saw a project killed by Congressional Democrats last week when they objected to the Futures Markets Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP) idea. The Democrats objected to the morality of it. DARPA itself should have dropped the idea long ago because it just wouldn't work. The foolishness of the idea, and the embarrassment that it brought, is what comes from practicing economics without a license. Click here to read why.

Uzans Must Surrender Telsim
Corporate lying, fraud and deceit are often miscast in the media as either acts by honest, but slightly over-zealous, senior management or as battles between corporate elephants and shareholder pygmies. Usually it's a case of "good guys" (those one ideologically supports) bad guys (those one opposes for the same reasons). In the recent Motorola/Nokia case against Telsim, it is hard to cast either in the role. Motorola and Nokia got defrauded, and the courts agreed to support the claims they made against Telsim. Click here to read more.

Nazis Weren't Economic Wizards
Glenview State Bank, outside Chicago, got a lesson in public relations and history last week, when it received several angry letters. The bank's July issue of its magazine Outlook said that Adolf Hitler's economic policies got Germany going again. As usual, the Anti-Defamation League protested the apparent compliment, and the bank apologized on its website and elsewhere in appropriately sorrowful terms. The complaint was that the economic achievements of Herr Hitler could not be divorced from the rest of the evil he perpetrated. What was missing in this episode was any actual analysis of Nazi economic policy. Click here for our view.