The late Pierre A. Rinfret's "blogs" on Wayback Machine

I came across the late economist Pierre Rinfret's website pages recently and found them to be informative and amusing. During the last several years of his life, Rinfret shared his experiences and views about economics and politics with the world, via the Internet, compelled by a desire to share his wisdom with the next generation.

Here are some links to a few posts that I found interesting:

12/8/05 PERSPECTIVE ON CHAOS

5/8/02 AMATEURS IN OFFICE OR WHY EVERY PRESIDENT HAS TROUBLE KNOWING WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE AMERICAN ECONOMY

"Wall Street Starts at a river and ends at a cemetery"

FEAR AND THE AMERICAN ECONOMY IN 2002

FINANCIAL SCANDALS AND BOARDS OF DIRECTORS

Link from Visualizing Economics: Flashback Economy/Prices

I came across a link on the Visualizing Economics blog to the Flashback website , where you can find information about the economy as it was from the 1960's to the present.

What we really need now is "flash-forward" website!

Deja Vu-Doo Economics

Deja Vu-Doo Economics is a term used in the media that refers to economic policies and philosophies that echo those put into place by President Ronald Reagan during the 1980's. Reagan's policies were called "Voo-Doo" economics by his nay-sayers, and were also known as "Reaganomics".

Reaganomics helped improve the economy during that decade, and as a result, which helped us forget how bad it was in 1981 and 1982.

.

Some of us forgot that this led us to 1987, the year of Black Monday. The date was October 19, 1987. The stock markets around the world crashed to the ground, but by the end of the year, there was an uptick.

From Wikipedia:



I know I will have to dig a little deeper for the "truth"....sadly, much of what I've found that relates to economics is intertwined with politics and half-truths from both sides of the line.


The following article discusses topics such as Tobin's Q, the "Greater Fool Theory", and Professor Irving Fisher, of Yale University:

Why the Bull is a Compulsive Climber
Peter Passell, The New York Times
October 20, 1996

"Up, up, up it goes, and where it stops nobody knows. Since stock prices began climbing out of the trough of the 1990 recession, the Dow Jones industrial average has grown at 10 times the pace of the American economy. Perhaps as remarkable, investors have brushed aside every bit of troubling news -- from interest rate increases to the defeat of an incumbent Republican President -- with barely a hiccup. Not once in the last six years have stock prices fallen by as much as 10 percent."

Deja Vu-Doo Economics

Reagonomics or 'voodoo economics"?
BBC News, Saturday, June 5, 2004

The return of voodoo economics
Salon.com, September 5, 2002
Arianna Huffington

"There's another blast from the Reagan past that is a little more relevant to most Americans' current financial health than trickle-down dreams. Ask yourself, my friends, are you better off today, after all that tax cutting and deregulating, than you were four years ago?"

Additional resources:
Carlson, Mark (2007) "A Brief History of the 1987 Stock Market Crash with a Discussion of the Federal Reserve Response,"Divisions of Research & Statistics and Monetary Affairs Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C.

Black Monday Ten Years After: The Motley Fool's 1987 Timeline
(1997)

(The above resources were found on Wikipedia.)