Morning roundup: mostly Friedmans edition

• Jeff Friedman on the causes of the crisis. Friedman argues that the Recourse Rule, an amendment in the US to Basel rules on bank capitalisation, provided banks with strong incentive to securitize their mortgage assets so as to be subject to lower capital requirements. An explanation I hadn't heard before, and plausible.


• Patri Friedman on public choice reasons for fiscal rather than monetary stimulus


• Patri Friedman: does decentralization lead to social regression?

And now some non-Friedman links

• David Levine beats up on Krugman (HT Mankiw) Krugman responds to freshwater critics.


• Crowdsourcing on the Mechanical Turk


• John Tierney on drug prohibition. He links to a nice New York Magazine review.