International Investing

Understanding the credit crisis means acknowledging that while the financial instruments involved may be new, the government sponsored inflation and regulation that brought it on is not. The classics of Bastiat, Mises, and Rothbard read like they could have been written this week. This great find by the Mises Institute is by Thomas Paine:

One of the evils of paper money is that it turns the whole country into stock jobbers.
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There are a set of men who go about making purchases upon credit, and buying estates they have not wherewithal to pay for; and having done this, their next step is to fill the newspapers with paragraphs of the scarcity of money and the necessity of a paper emission, then to have a legal tender under the pretense of supporting its credit, and when out, to depreciate it as fast as they can, get a deal of it for a little price, and cheat their creditors; and this is the concise history of paper money schemes.