Business Cycles / William L. Anderson

At last, everyone agrees that the US economy is sinking into the morass of depression. The question is why.

Business cycles are usually treated as though they were unavoidable natural phenomena, writes William Anderson, when they are actually the result of government manipulation.

No one can argue about the current moribund economy, complete with flat or falling stock prices, nonexistent profits, layoffs, airline bankruptcies, and exploding federal and state budget deficits. But few people have accurately pointed out why there is no recovery from the original recession.

The policies the Fed cooked up during the mid-1990s that brought on the unsustainable boom (mistakenly called the "New Economy") are also the policies that Greenspan employed in the last year, ostensibly to give us a "soft landing." The government is now engaged in a number of foolish regulatory...