Forums: Panic Or Anxiety Attack

Princess Aiko, the eight-year-old granddaughter of the Japanese Emperor, has become unable to go to school after suffering a series of anxiety attacks and stomach aches. Her problems, said the Imperial Household Agency, arose from her “rough behaviour” at the hands of boys in her age group at the ultra-exclusive Gakushuin school she attends in central Tokyo.

Okay, so I just got back from the store...DC is close to a full-blown panic about the storm heading our way. There's an interesting race-to-the-bottom dynamic that overtakes DC when it snows. People hie to the supermarket as if a billion Chinese zombies with frickn' lasers strapped to their heads are about to invade from outer space and nobody knows the correct translation of "Klaatu burada nikto." When I lived in Adam's Morgan (the most New York City-ish DC neighborhood) I was amazed at how people would buy not just canned goods and, say, chili-fixings, but gallons and gallons of...

For decades, American liberty writers have been warning of an inordinate reaction from public servants in time of crisis. We also know that you don't let a good crisis go to waste, because it is an opportunity to do things the electorate would never let you do otherwise. The Founding Fathers warned that a government which does not trust its people itself cannot be trusted. The acting out of public servants for what they mistakenly believe about the electorate is something they elect to back by force, as in gun control. Public servants are this way tragically mistaken about the...

All the US bank runs and panics of the late 19th century — 1857, 1861, 1866, 1873, 1877, 1890, 1893, 1896 and 1907 — are clearly visible in the chart below of the call money rate — the rate for borrowing collateralised against equities. The call money market was the “shadow money” of its day — and lending terms almost always tightened when the underlying collateral was in a bear market, and usually eased remarkably quickly once it was over. The big difference this time round was that we had a wholesale funding run starting in the shadow banking itself,...

Global markets sank sharply at the end of last week on fears that Dubai World, a subsidiary of the government of Dubai, was on the verge of defaulting on approximately $60 billion of the emirate's $80 billion in total debt held by creditors world-wide. The rush of news stories added to the wildfire of panicky speculation, with headlines ranging from "Dubai Default Risk May be Big US Bank Problem," to "Dubai Shows Limits of Government Rescues." The mini-panic, however, has little to do with Dubai and everything to do with the tenuous psychology of global investors still skittish after the...