Via Economic Policy Journal Will Luther writes: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert,” the economist Milton Friedman once quipped, “in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” The U.S. Mint, to its credit, had a much longer run. The Federal Reserve, which purchases coins from the Mint and...
Via Economic Policy Journal Sir John Cowperthwaite By Robert Wenzel The Center for Disease Control is a hotbed of anti-Trump sentiment. President Trump and those around him are starting to get it. The Washington Post reports: “There is a view the CDC is staffed with ‘deep state’ Democrats that are trying to tweak the administration,”...
Via Economic Policy Journal Joe Biden On Thursday, former Vice President Joe Biden laid out a $700 billion plan to “revive” the U.S. economy that he said would implement if he becomes president. The plan calls for massive government intervention in the economy. Under the “Buy American” plan, the federal government would spend $400 billion...
Via Economic Policy Journal By Jeff Deist The intense pressure to politicize every aspect of academia will not spare economics, and why would it? A society willing to topple statues is hardly one to worry about pulling down a body of knowledge, especially one skillfully characterized by the Left as a political program rather than an...
Via Economic Policy Journal Federal Reserve building, Washington D.C. A joint effort by former Vice President Joe Biden and socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to unify Democrats around Biden’s candidacy has produced a 110-page policy statement that was released yesterday. Most alarming in the paper is a recommendation that bank accounts be made available at...
Via Economic Policy Journal A Korowai tribe member Chris Barcelo points me to a post by George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen: “The purchasing power of money is the same everywhere” Didn’t Mises insist on that proposition in his Theory of Money and Credit? The claim always bugged me, as it is true only tautologically. Here is...
Via Economic Policy Journal In an open letter, eleven mayors are calling for a guaranteed income for all. Of course, they don;t have the money to pay for such a vote-buying, economy destroying plan, so they are calling for federal and state financing of the program. The problem is that federal governments and state governments don’t...
Via Economic Policy Journal Tyler Cowen makes the case in his July 4th Bloomberg column that the failure of some NBA players to return to work has implications for the rest of the workforce: Key snippets: As a fan of professional basketball and a student of economic game theory, I am becoming increasingly concerned. I fear...
Via Economic Policy Journal Casey B. Mulligan, professor of economics at the University of Chicago and author of “You’re Hired!,” and Stephen Moore, a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, report in The Wall Street Journal: The White House will soon begin negotiating with congressional Democrats on a “Phase 4” economic revival plan. President Trump has repeatedly...
Via Economic Policy Journal Noam Chomsky During an interview with the Greek newspaper Ekathimerini, Noam Chomsky blamed “the logic of capitalism” for the current COVID-19 economic crisis. “The pandemic derives from deep failures of capitalism exacerbated by the impact of its savage neoliberal version. In 2003, after the SARS epidemic was contained, scientists warned that...
Via Economic Policy Journal Rafael Acevedo is a distinguished Venezuelan economist, now in part-time residence at Texas Tech University, who is deeply concerned about the future of his native country. Socialism has brought Venezuela to rack and ruin, and if the country is to recover, a move to the free market is essential. Many have...
Via Economic Policy Journal At the post, Cirque Du Soleil Files For Bankruptcy, Dominick asks an important question: RW, any opinion on how harmful (to the economy) these bankruptcies actually are? After all, it is a way to shed debt and reorganize the balance sheet…and come back leaner and meaner than before. Any comment? There is...
Via Economic Policy Journal Joe Biden and Larry Summers It appears that Larry Summers is going out of his way to restore his lefty credentials after setting them on fire when he was president of Harvard University. The tone-deaf Summers said, in comments at a conference held by the National Bureau of Economic Research on January...
Via Economic Policy Journal Henry Kaufman Henry Kaufman was a former senior partner of Salomon Brothers and, during the early part of the 1980s, the bond market reacted to every word he said. He was such an influential Wall Street analyst that when David Stockman was head of the Office of Management during the early part...
Via Economic Policy Journal Stephen Roach, a Yale University senior fellow and former Morgan Stanley Asia chairman, tells MarketWatch that his forecast for a sharp deterioration of the U.S. dollar could be a very near-term phenomenon, not an event that looms off in the distance. “I do think it’s something that happens sooner rather than...
Via Economic Policy Journal The COVID-19 related bailouts are not stopping. There are trillions more dollars the Federal Reserve is going to have to print out of thin air. The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson sets the scene (my highlight): It can be said without fear of contradiction that the government’s strategy for dealing with the...
Via Economic Policy Journal Stanford University Economist John H. Cochrane, a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, has a commentary at his blog post, The cancel culture twitter mob comes to economics, where he discusses the actions taken against Harald Uhlig after a left-wing attack. Uhlig, a University of Chicago professor, was also editor...
Via Economic Policy Journal Is the Federal Reserve going to use “systemic racism” as another reason to continue its massive money pumping? Money pumping is truly out of control. The 13-week annualized money supply growth that I track is now climbing at a rate of 57.4%. Yes, this is not a typo, 57.4%. Here is...
Via Economic Policy Journal By Craig Eyermann The pensions of public employees, the people who work for state or local governments, are in trouble. After years of promises by politicians—who, like public employees themselves, have done little to provide funds to pay for the generous retirement benefits—many public employee pension funds are now at increased risk...
Via Economic Policy Journal As Joe Biden picks up steam in the presidential campaign, it makes sense to look at which economists are advising him. One problem. It’s a secret. The New York Times reports: Few aspects of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential campaign are shrouded in as much secrecy as the counsel he receives...