The Washington Post had an excellent piece on states and how they handled their tobacco settlement dollars (available here). It is a longer article but well worth the read given that it is one of the first analyses of what states are doing with the money from this settlement. The answer for many: squandering it. I am not going to rehash all the details of the article but there are bigger issues to tackle.
I get a significant number of questions about markets and market interventions when I am on the radio. Part of this is due to the economic circumstances in North Dakota where significant growth is creating social tensions and frictions. Another key ingredient is the financial resources available to the state. Tax collections continue to do well, feeding the interventionist tendencies of politicians and policy makers.
The subtitle for this post could be why we need to resist the “temptation” to meddle with housing markets in North Dakota. There are times and places for interventions, but you need clear standards for action, clear goals, and clear exit strategies.
Housing issues of all sorts are a hot topic nationally, not just in Grand Forks or North Dakota. I thought we could look at price levels for three different geographic regions. The first is the Grand Forks metro area since that is one of the topics most frequently mentioned in my appearances on the Jarrod Thomas Show (1310 KNOX radio in Grand Forks). The next area is North Dakota and the last is the United States as a whole.
Being a frequent contributor to the Jarrod Thomas Show (1310 KNOX AM, Grand Forks) over the last several years I received many questions about inflation. The massive monetary stimulus injected by the Fed in response to the Great Recession “must” be inflationary. Many callers believed there was no way to avoid a massive inflation as an outcome.