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Apr 24, 2024
Decades ago national security eminence Dick Allen asked Ronald Reagan what the strategy was for the Cold War. Reagan boldly responded “We win. They lose.”
Reagan’s...
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Apr 23, 2024
The Peterson Institute for International Economics is running billboard ads in Washington, D.C. about - you guessed it - the federal debt. The ads read something like this: Each Day...
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Apr 23, 2024
Let the flow of people and corporations decide the good, bad or in between of employment contracts.
-
Apr 22, 2024
The fallacious notions that inform economics as practiced by leading economists of the various religions can be found in the bark stripped from the argeli shrub in Nepal.
-
Apr 20, 2024
Randolph Bourne famously said that “war is the health of the state.” A corollary to Bourne long written here is that “crises” are the state’s...
-
Apr 19, 2024
"The single most significant, inter-galactic, extra-celestial, interplanetary, and spiritual force behind the global stock market rally is the decline of inflation to rates not seen...
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Apr 18, 2024
In his excellent new memoir, Never Say You Had a Lucky Life (review coming soon), Joseph Epstein writes of a Harvard economics professor by the name of Alexander Gerschenkron who...
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Apr 17, 2024
Technology giant Nvidia opened its doors in 1993, and publicly floated its shares in 1999. Did you purchase on IPO day, or in 2020? Perhaps early 2023?
Readers know the answer to...
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Apr 16, 2024
Walter Wriston long ago observed that capital goes where it’s treated well. Wriston would no doubt have admitted, were he still alive, that he was stating the obvious. Capital...
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Apr 15, 2024
A definition of inflation that loudly suggests markets are stupid. They're not.
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Apr 13, 2024
What work would you do if money were no object? It’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves, and it’s surely a question some are asking now.
It’s interesting to...
-
Apr 12, 2024
People who graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1990s all have a variation of the same story: they know someone or they were that someone who quit a job at...
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Apr 11, 2024
In addition to my sister Kim, I dedicated my 2019 book, They’re Both Wrong: A Policy Guide For Independent Thinkers, to the “alarmists of the dominant ideologies.”...
-
Apr 10, 2024
Critics of Social Security, and there’s much to criticize, use the lack of a “lock box” or actual “trust fund” to make their emotional cases for the...
-
Apr 9, 2024
More than most federal agencies today, the FTC embodies the old notion of a bureaucracy in search of a purpose. Precisely because the rather open U.S. economy is defined by...
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Apr 8, 2024
To bring the Fed into a discussion of the dollar is just odd.
-
Apr 6, 2024
“Success in music requires discipline, dedication, and a lifelong commitment to learning and self-improvement.” Those are the words of the late and legendary pianist Van...
-
Apr 5, 2024
A 2017 report on India in the New York Times indicated that 564 million of its citizens lack toilets, indoor or outdoor. What a tragedy. Only it gets worse.
Women in the country are...
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Apr 4, 2024
The federal government is the biggest buyer in the world. Stop and think about that.
To the vast majority of economists, the federal government’s gargantuan buying footprint is...
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Apr 3, 2024
Once past the embarrassment that the U.S. political class is so fearful of TikTok, and once past the shame that the political class would express its TikTok fears through brazen...
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Apr 2, 2024
“To be clear, that bank executives might have turned a blind eye to Trump’s fraud does not necessarily mean there were no victims. Giving Trump financial products he...
-
Apr 1, 2024
If you’re talking about so-called “money supply” you’re guilty of obnoxious conceit on par with Soviet Five Year Plans.
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Mar 30, 2024
The 4-Day Workweek is on the way. It won’t become a thing because of legislation, but paradoxically because Americans are more in love with their work than ever.
What’s...
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Mar 29, 2024
Mick Mulvaney is disappointed with “everybody who gets elected” because they’re not like – you guessed it - Mick Mulvaney.
So, what is Mick Mulvaney like?...
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Mar 28, 2024
“Right off the lobby, to get to your class, I’d set up a system of tubes made of glass. You hop in a pod, press the number, then ZOOM! In under ten seconds, you’re...
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Mar 27, 2024
TikTok beat the competition, yet its owners are supposed to sell their creation to those they beat?
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Mar 27, 2024
Economist Ike Brannon talks of a stretch in the 1980s when he worked as a professor down in Peru. Snack giant Nestle had a substantial business there by Peruvian standards, only for...
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Mar 26, 2024
On March 25, 2020 Congress passed the $2.9 trillion CARES Act. It was a wrongheaded, but all-too-typical response from Congress to the immense damage (tens of millions unemployed,...
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Mar 25, 2024
To pretend that central banks are necessary to instigate or restrain inflation is to dream in non sequiturs.
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Mar 23, 2024
School drop-off isn’t a commonly mentioned market signal, but it’s arguably a relevant one. It’s not nothing that fathers are more and more the ones dropping kids...
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Mar 22, 2024
Does Chris Kempczinski want the U.S. to go war with China? It’s easy to answer for the McDonald’s CEO that he hopes for peaceful relations now, and well into the future....
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Mar 21, 2024
The brackets for the NCAA tournament were released on Sunday. About them, how many college basketball games did you watch this season?
UConn is billed as the prohibitive favorite to...
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Mar 20, 2024
The worst arguments against the lockdowns inspired by the coronavirus were medical and statistical. To see why, it’s worth remembering that as humans we’ve evolved to...
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Mar 19, 2024
“Well, you don’t see that every day.” Those were the opening words of an editorial about TikTok in the Wall Street Journal....
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Mar 18, 2024
Central banks have no resources, and surely cannot buy the debt of the government that created them.
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Mar 16, 2024
Ahead of takeoff on a recent flight, I overheard a nearby passenger telling his child “make good decisions today.” What great advice. Right to the point. Good decisions...
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Mar 15, 2024
Imagine a world defined by largely autarkic cities, states and countries. In such a world, wildly primitive living conditions and immense poverty would be the sad norm.
That it would...
-
Mar 14, 2024
As TikTok-banning conservatives reveal just how situational their belief in limited government is, some are hiding behind Vladimir Lenin to justify their apostasy. Lenin famously...
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Mar 13, 2024
Paraphrasing my RealClear colleague Joe Calhoun, you can’t invest like everyone else and expect to outperform. Bill Ackman’s billionaire status at such a young age...
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Mar 12, 2024
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." – Ben Franklin
As of May of 2020, more than 40 million...
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Mar 11, 2024
Since when does monetary and fiscal intervention boost economic growth?
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Mar 9, 2024
The Washington Examiner’s excellent Conn Carroll is the latest, but surely not the last, to gloss over the crucial truth that the only “closed economy” is the world...
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Mar 8, 2024
“China has enjoyed miraculous economic expansion for the last few decades.” Vox’s Nicole Narea wrote the latter for a piece in which she decried China’s lack...
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Mar 7, 2024
Apple recently announced that it would shutter a division within the company that aimed to mass-produce automobiles. Underlying the initiative was the belief that automobiles are but...
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Mar 7, 2024
Nike signed Colin Kaepernick to a major endorsement deal in 2018. As readers doubtless remember, the combination of the former NFL star with the one of the world’s foremost...
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Mar 6, 2024
It wasn’t too long ago that Great Britain could claim no British-owned automakers of note. Was this a signal of the disappearance of auto manufacturing in the country that gave...
-
Mar 6, 2024
Everyone says they love low rates of interest, but do they really? Logic says no.
Think about it. And in thinking about it, imagine if the Fed could actually decree credit costless...
-
Mar 5, 2024
U.S. stock markets are not reliant on Federal Reserve rate cuts for their vitality. Repeat the previous truth over and over again for now, while forever marveling that such a fatuous...
-
Mar 4, 2024
You quite simply cannot recreate a miracle of intricate cooperation on a global scale within a week, months, or years.
-
Mar 2, 2024
“The doctrine of noblesse oblige became discredited, dismissed as corrupt and ‘elitist.’” Lance Morrow wrote the latter in the Wall Street Journal last Friday...
-
Mar 1, 2024
I’ve only gone hunting once, but what a revelation it was. Hunters are the personification of careful around guns.
So fearful was I of getting gun etiquette wrong on my lone...
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Feb 29, 2024
Nowadays the vast majority of companies that defined the internet boom of the late 20th/early 21st century are gone, but not the fruits of this powerful jump into a better...
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Feb 28, 2024
“President Reagan cut taxes and deficits soared.” Those are the words of Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle. Decades after Reagan was served as president, his tax...
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Feb 28, 2024
“Politicians in both parties broadly agree that a handful of tech companies hold too much power.” Those are the words of former U.S. attorney general, William P. Barr,...
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Feb 27, 2024
Years ago I asked Ed Crane about an upcoming Olympic Games, and he expressed indifference. While he’s a big sports fan, Crane is not a big fan of the Olympics. His reasoning...
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Feb 27, 2024
“No matter your business, you cannot stay still for any length of time or your competitors will scratch and claw all over you.” Those are the words of Home Depot...
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Feb 26, 2024
The last way any sentient being would ever fight higher prices is with fewer workers.
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Feb 24, 2024
July Shelton was nominated for a position at the Federal Reserve on July 2, 2019. That Democrats were opposed to Donald Trump’s Fed nominee was a given. What’s more...
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Feb 23, 2024
Paraphrasing George Orwell, some things are so foolish only an economist could believe them. Which quickly brings us to Lael Brainard, director of the Biden administration’s...
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Feb 22, 2024
In an old South Park episode, the very un-PC creators laid out what girls should look for in a boyfriend. One “tell” that signaled for girls to move on was the...
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Feb 21, 2024
In the 1960s, millions swam across the Sham Chun River that separates Hong Kong from Shenzhen on China’s mainland. It’s a waste of words to say where the millions were...
-
Feb 20, 2024
When he returned home from a visit to the Soviet Union in 1981, Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane wrote a classic essay (Fear and Loathing In the Soviet Union) in which he called...
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Feb 19, 2024
Resources go to where they're treated well, and without regard to what central bankers do.
-
Feb 17, 2024
With his eponymous company, Henry Ford aimed to produce cars for the “multitude.” And so he did. It’s almost a waste of words to write about how he did it, but the...
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Feb 16, 2024
New York Knicks owner James Dolan is the money behind the $2.3 billion marvel in Las Vegas known as Sphere. It’s worth reading again that James Dolan, arguably one of the most...
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Feb 15, 2024
Compound interest or compound returns are fascinating. If you’re reading this, you don’t need to be told why. Time combined with money put to work can and does result in...
-
Feb 14, 2024
Javier Milei’s stature among free thinkers is presently substantial. His recent speech at the World Economic Forum shows why. How rare for a country’s leader to so...
-
Feb 13, 2024
Economies aren’t blobs or machines that occasionally pull over to dollar “filling stations.” In reality, economies are just individuals interconnected with...
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Feb 12, 2024
While accepting yet another award in 2010, Bruce Springsteen brought his mother Adele up on stage, along with sisters Dora and Eda. As he explained it, “They put the rock...
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Feb 12, 2024
The bitter fruits of unexpected events can’t be regulated or voted away.
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Feb 10, 2024
As a high school freshman I mentioned with awe to classmate Nick Shectman that a student at my previous school (Steve Garvin) understood computers better than did the computer...
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Feb 9, 2024
Napoleon “did not realize until it was too late that the only closed political economy is the world economy. Britain could not be starved into submission by blockade...
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Feb 8, 2024
In 2020, and after eleven seasons on air, ABC ran the last episode of mega-hit Modern Family. A newspaper account indicated that Modern Family was realistically the last show of its...
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Feb 7, 2024
If individuals comprise the U.S. economy, and they do, how could the U.S. have a trade “deficit”? It’s a useful question when it’s remembered that as far as...
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Feb 7, 2024
According to U.S. Census Bureau data, from 2017 to 2021 1 out of 5 new arrivals to Phoenix came from California. No doubt all sorts of factors inform a move, housing prices most...
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Feb 6, 2024
An enduring monetary myth is that Germany was awash in marks amid the “money printing” extravaganza that took place after World War I. A perhaps apocryphal story of a...
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Feb 6, 2024
Mytheresa is an online retailer of luxury items. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote reported on its lavish events thrown for its most frequent buyers in the U.S. Mytheresa gives...
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Feb 5, 2024
Abnormal for 20 years has been the Fed and its blind stabs at central planning. So wrong for so long, yet the U.S. economy continues to grow. Yes, the Fed is irrelevant.
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Feb 3, 2024
Were the Beatles better musicians and singers than songwriters? It’s a question worth asking. As in could they have produced even more hits if they’d left the songwriting...
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Feb 2, 2024
School drop-off in modern times is a bit of a marvel. To a substantial degree, parents from the 20th century wouldn’t recognize it. Think about it. So many fathers leaving...
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Feb 1, 2024
Economists, pundits, and politicians would write and say much wiser things if they would take a few minutes and consider the trajectory of California’s richest companies. Think...
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Jan 31, 2024
Prices are the way that a market economy organizes itself. It’s too easily forgotten, but it’s through naturally arrived at prices that providers of goods and services...
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Jan 30, 2024
Seemingly lost on the myriad deficit hawks in our midst is that the extraction of wealth from the economy is the true governmental sin, and also the crisis. Whether the extraction is...
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Jan 29, 2024
Economies gain strength from periods of weakness, so do stock markets.
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Jan 27, 2024
“He’s a savant. That’s the only way I can say it.” Those are the words of Tee Martin, quarterbacks coach for the Baltimore Ravens, from an interview with...
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Jan 26, 2024
A headline earlier in the week indicated that the searching-for-a-purpose EU governing body would attempt to block Amazon’s purchase of iRobot. It would seem the EU is trying...
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Jan 25, 2024
It was in 2018 that the business media began seriously picking up on the massive business being created by Kylie Jenner. We should excuse the journalists. Figure that Jenner had...
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Jan 24, 2024
Have you ever heard of a city, state or country that’s thriving by virtue of being economically stuck in the past? Neither have I.
It’s something to think about as...
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Jan 24, 2024
“I could buy whatever I want, an iPhone and a computer, AirPods and a Barbie Dreamhouse. A real Barbie Dreamhouse that’s big and has walls. It would be in Paris because...
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Jan 23, 2024
In speeches given to rapt audiences over the decades, Cato Institute distinguished senior fellow Jose Pinera has talked about the exciting implications of his time as Minister of...
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Jan 22, 2024
To focus on the Fed when it comes to prices is to engage in obnoxious non sequitur.
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Jan 20, 2024
The 20th century called and it wants the word crisis back, the first half of the 20th century in particular. Back then crises were truly terrifying. Think two world wars...
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Jan 19, 2024
Up front, I’m strongly of the view that “crypto” or “private money” will soon enough replace the dollar, euro, yuan, pound, Swiss franc, and any other...
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Jan 18, 2024
In the classic Fyodor Dostoevsky novel Crime and Punishment, Rodion Romanych Raskolnikov commits the murders that shape the book in the midst of a sweltering St. Petersburg...
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Jan 17, 2024
Reader A finished Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment last night, while Reader B completed Llama Llama Learns to Swim. Did Reader A and B do the same thing?...
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Jan 17, 2024
Every so often a video of Milton Friedman on the Phil Donahue Show goes viral. In it, the late Friedman reminds Donahue that even though “greed” has been abolished in the...
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Jan 16, 2024
Imagine if Jeff Bezos had been born in 1864 instead of 1964. What a tragedy for Americans if so, and realistically for humankind.
If born 100 years earlier there’s no debating...
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Jan 15, 2024
The 1970s inflation was true inflation, a currency devaluation that Arthur Burns passionately opposed.
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Jan 13, 2024
Back in 2012 a very good and entertaining writer submitted his weekly column to me. He was very specific about neither the title nor the next being edited, as his stated goal was to...
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Jan 12, 2024
It’s been said about Bernard Madoff that he wanted to be caught. That knowledge of the extent of his crimes was its own burden, one relieved by those same crimes being exposed....
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Jan 11, 2024
Professor Ellison has been called before the administrators at his Los Angeles-area prestige university. He’s offended yet another easily offended student. Ellison asks why...
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Jan 10, 2024
Billionaire investor and entrepreneur Ken Fisher routinely reminds people that if they’re aware of a looming crisis or calamity, that they should forget about it and move on....
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Jan 9, 2024
Ahead of the 2016 presidential vote, it was popular on the left and right to respectively say that if Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton won the election, the U.S. was finished as a...
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Jan 8, 2024
The Fed is powerless when it comes restraining the flow of resources to their highest purpose.
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Jan 6, 2024
There’s that saying that individuals shouldn’t stand in the way when the enemy is hanging himself. What’s true for individuals is arguably true in a commercial...
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Jan 5, 2024
At present, oil extraction in the United States sits at record levels of roughly 13.2 million barrels per day. No wonder oil is so expensive.
Wait, what’s that you say? U.S....
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Jan 4, 2024
In a recent Family Guy episode, Meg Griffin is told by her psychiatrist that he only accepts crypto as payment. Meg’s virtual wallet is populated by Bitcoin, Doge, Ethereum and...
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Jan 3, 2024
The story keeps writing itself. In 2018 I published a book titled The End of Work. Sadly, my working and more appropriate title (The End of Laziness) was nixed by the publisher....
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Jan 2, 2024
Considering New York City, it’s no reach to suggest that apartment rents are one of the biggest concerns for voters there. That's no insight. The world’s most talented...
Apr 24, 2024Decades ago national security eminence Dick Allen asked Ronald Reagan what the strategy was for the Cold War. Reagan boldly responded “We win. They lose.” Reagan’s...
Apr 23, 2024The Peterson Institute for International Economics is running billboard ads in Washington, D.C. about - you guessed it - the federal debt. The ads read something like this: Each Day...
Apr 23, 2024Let the flow of people and corporations decide the good, bad or in between of employment contracts.
Apr 22, 2024The fallacious notions that inform economics as practiced by leading economists of the various religions can be found in the bark stripped from the argeli shrub in Nepal.
Apr 20, 2024Randolph Bourne famously said that “war is the health of the state.” A corollary to Bourne long written here is that “crises” are the state’s...
Apr 19, 2024"The single most significant, inter-galactic, extra-celestial, interplanetary, and spiritual force behind the global stock market rally is the decline of inflation to rates not seen...
Apr 18, 2024In his excellent new memoir, Never Say You Had a Lucky Life (review coming soon), Joseph Epstein writes of a Harvard economics professor by the name of Alexander Gerschenkron who...
Apr 17, 2024Technology giant Nvidia opened its doors in 1993, and publicly floated its shares in 1999. Did you purchase on IPO day, or in 2020? Perhaps early 2023? Readers know the answer to...
Apr 16, 2024Walter Wriston long ago observed that capital goes where it’s treated well. Wriston would no doubt have admitted, were he still alive, that he was stating the obvious. Capital...
Apr 15, 2024A definition of inflation that loudly suggests markets are stupid. They're not.
Apr 13, 2024What work would you do if money were no object? It’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves, and it’s surely a question some are asking now. It’s interesting to...
Apr 12, 2024People who graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1990s all have a variation of the same story: they know someone or they were that someone who quit a job at...
Apr 11, 2024In addition to my sister Kim, I dedicated my 2019 book, They’re Both Wrong: A Policy Guide For Independent Thinkers, to the “alarmists of the dominant ideologies.”...
Apr 10, 2024Critics of Social Security, and there’s much to criticize, use the lack of a “lock box” or actual “trust fund” to make their emotional cases for the...
Apr 9, 2024More than most federal agencies today, the FTC embodies the old notion of a bureaucracy in search of a purpose. Precisely because the rather open U.S. economy is defined by...
Apr 8, 2024To bring the Fed into a discussion of the dollar is just odd.
Apr 6, 2024“Success in music requires discipline, dedication, and a lifelong commitment to learning and self-improvement.” Those are the words of the late and legendary pianist Van...
Apr 5, 2024A 2017 report on India in the New York Times indicated that 564 million of its citizens lack toilets, indoor or outdoor. What a tragedy. Only it gets worse. Women in the country are...
Apr 4, 2024The federal government is the biggest buyer in the world. Stop and think about that. To the vast majority of economists, the federal government’s gargantuan buying footprint is...
Apr 3, 2024Once past the embarrassment that the U.S. political class is so fearful of TikTok, and once past the shame that the political class would express its TikTok fears through brazen...
Apr 2, 2024“To be clear, that bank executives might have turned a blind eye to Trump’s fraud does not necessarily mean there were no victims. Giving Trump financial products he...
Apr 1, 2024If you’re talking about so-called “money supply” you’re guilty of obnoxious conceit on par with Soviet Five Year Plans.
Mar 30, 2024The 4-Day Workweek is on the way. It won’t become a thing because of legislation, but paradoxically because Americans are more in love with their work than ever. What’s...
Mar 29, 2024Mick Mulvaney is disappointed with “everybody who gets elected” because they’re not like – you guessed it - Mick Mulvaney. So, what is Mick Mulvaney like?...
Mar 28, 2024“Right off the lobby, to get to your class, I’d set up a system of tubes made of glass. You hop in a pod, press the number, then ZOOM! In under ten seconds, you’re...
Mar 27, 2024TikTok beat the competition, yet its owners are supposed to sell their creation to those they beat?
Mar 27, 2024Economist Ike Brannon talks of a stretch in the 1980s when he worked as a professor down in Peru. Snack giant Nestle had a substantial business there by Peruvian standards, only for...
Mar 26, 2024On March 25, 2020 Congress passed the $2.9 trillion CARES Act. It was a wrongheaded, but all-too-typical response from Congress to the immense damage (tens of millions unemployed,...
Mar 25, 2024To pretend that central banks are necessary to instigate or restrain inflation is to dream in non sequiturs.
Mar 23, 2024School drop-off isn’t a commonly mentioned market signal, but it’s arguably a relevant one. It’s not nothing that fathers are more and more the ones dropping kids...
Mar 22, 2024Does Chris Kempczinski want the U.S. to go war with China? It’s easy to answer for the McDonald’s CEO that he hopes for peaceful relations now, and well into the future....
Mar 21, 2024The brackets for the NCAA tournament were released on Sunday. About them, how many college basketball games did you watch this season? UConn is billed as the prohibitive favorite to...
Mar 20, 2024The worst arguments against the lockdowns inspired by the coronavirus were medical and statistical. To see why, it’s worth remembering that as humans we’ve evolved to...
Mar 18, 2024Central banks have no resources, and surely cannot buy the debt of the government that created them.
Mar 16, 2024Ahead of takeoff on a recent flight, I overheard a nearby passenger telling his child “make good decisions today.” What great advice. Right to the point. Good decisions...
Mar 15, 2024Imagine a world defined by largely autarkic cities, states and countries. In such a world, wildly primitive living conditions and immense poverty would be the sad norm. That it would...
Mar 14, 2024As TikTok-banning conservatives reveal just how situational their belief in limited government is, some are hiding behind Vladimir Lenin to justify their apostasy. Lenin famously...
Mar 13, 2024Paraphrasing my RealClear colleague Joe Calhoun, you can’t invest like everyone else and expect to outperform. Bill Ackman’s billionaire status at such a young age...
Mar 11, 2024Since when does monetary and fiscal intervention boost economic growth?
Mar 9, 2024The Washington Examiner’s excellent Conn Carroll is the latest, but surely not the last, to gloss over the crucial truth that the only “closed economy” is the world...
Mar 8, 2024“China has enjoyed miraculous economic expansion for the last few decades.” Vox’s Nicole Narea wrote the latter for a piece in which she decried China’s lack...
Mar 7, 2024Apple recently announced that it would shutter a division within the company that aimed to mass-produce automobiles. Underlying the initiative was the belief that automobiles are but...
Mar 7, 2024Nike signed Colin Kaepernick to a major endorsement deal in 2018. As readers doubtless remember, the combination of the former NFL star with the one of the world’s foremost...
Mar 6, 2024It wasn’t too long ago that Great Britain could claim no British-owned automakers of note. Was this a signal of the disappearance of auto manufacturing in the country that gave...
Mar 6, 2024Everyone says they love low rates of interest, but do they really? Logic says no. Think about it. And in thinking about it, imagine if the Fed could actually decree credit costless...
Mar 5, 2024U.S. stock markets are not reliant on Federal Reserve rate cuts for their vitality. Repeat the previous truth over and over again for now, while forever marveling that such a fatuous...
Mar 4, 2024You quite simply cannot recreate a miracle of intricate cooperation on a global scale within a week, months, or years.
Mar 2, 2024“The doctrine of noblesse oblige became discredited, dismissed as corrupt and ‘elitist.’” Lance Morrow wrote the latter in the Wall Street Journal last Friday...
Mar 1, 2024I’ve only gone hunting once, but what a revelation it was. Hunters are the personification of careful around guns. So fearful was I of getting gun etiquette wrong on my lone...
Feb 29, 2024Nowadays the vast majority of companies that defined the internet boom of the late 20th/early 21st century are gone, but not the fruits of this powerful jump into a better...
Feb 28, 2024“President Reagan cut taxes and deficits soared.” Those are the words of Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle. Decades after Reagan was served as president, his tax...
Feb 28, 2024“Politicians in both parties broadly agree that a handful of tech companies hold too much power.” Those are the words of former U.S. attorney general, William P. Barr,...
Feb 27, 2024Years ago I asked Ed Crane about an upcoming Olympic Games, and he expressed indifference. While he’s a big sports fan, Crane is not a big fan of the Olympics. His reasoning...
Feb 27, 2024“No matter your business, you cannot stay still for any length of time or your competitors will scratch and claw all over you.” Those are the words of Home Depot...
Feb 26, 2024The last way any sentient being would ever fight higher prices is with fewer workers.
Feb 24, 2024July Shelton was nominated for a position at the Federal Reserve on July 2, 2019. That Democrats were opposed to Donald Trump’s Fed nominee was a given. What’s more...
Feb 23, 2024Paraphrasing George Orwell, some things are so foolish only an economist could believe them. Which quickly brings us to Lael Brainard, director of the Biden administration’s...
Feb 22, 2024In an old South Park episode, the very un-PC creators laid out what girls should look for in a boyfriend. One “tell” that signaled for girls to move on was the...
Feb 21, 2024In the 1960s, millions swam across the Sham Chun River that separates Hong Kong from Shenzhen on China’s mainland. It’s a waste of words to say where the millions were...
Feb 20, 2024When he returned home from a visit to the Soviet Union in 1981, Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane wrote a classic essay (Fear and Loathing In the Soviet Union) in which he called...
Feb 19, 2024Resources go to where they're treated well, and without regard to what central bankers do.
Feb 17, 2024With his eponymous company, Henry Ford aimed to produce cars for the “multitude.” And so he did. It’s almost a waste of words to write about how he did it, but the...
Feb 16, 2024New York Knicks owner James Dolan is the money behind the $2.3 billion marvel in Las Vegas known as Sphere. It’s worth reading again that James Dolan, arguably one of the most...
Feb 15, 2024Compound interest or compound returns are fascinating. If you’re reading this, you don’t need to be told why. Time combined with money put to work can and does result in...
Feb 14, 2024Javier Milei’s stature among free thinkers is presently substantial. His recent speech at the World Economic Forum shows why. How rare for a country’s leader to so...
Feb 13, 2024Economies aren’t blobs or machines that occasionally pull over to dollar “filling stations.” In reality, economies are just individuals interconnected with...
Feb 12, 2024While accepting yet another award in 2010, Bruce Springsteen brought his mother Adele up on stage, along with sisters Dora and Eda. As he explained it, “They put the rock...
Feb 12, 2024The bitter fruits of unexpected events can’t be regulated or voted away.
Feb 10, 2024As a high school freshman I mentioned with awe to classmate Nick Shectman that a student at my previous school (Steve Garvin) understood computers better than did the computer...
Feb 9, 2024Napoleon “did not realize until it was too late that the only closed political economy is the world economy. Britain could not be starved into submission by blockade...
Feb 7, 2024If individuals comprise the U.S. economy, and they do, how could the U.S. have a trade “deficit”? It’s a useful question when it’s remembered that as far as...
Feb 7, 2024According to U.S. Census Bureau data, from 2017 to 2021 1 out of 5 new arrivals to Phoenix came from California. No doubt all sorts of factors inform a move, housing prices most...
Feb 6, 2024An enduring monetary myth is that Germany was awash in marks amid the “money printing” extravaganza that took place after World War I. A perhaps apocryphal story of a...
Feb 6, 2024Mytheresa is an online retailer of luxury items. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote reported on its lavish events thrown for its most frequent buyers in the U.S. Mytheresa gives...
Feb 3, 2024Were the Beatles better musicians and singers than songwriters? It’s a question worth asking. As in could they have produced even more hits if they’d left the songwriting...
Feb 2, 2024School drop-off in modern times is a bit of a marvel. To a substantial degree, parents from the 20th century wouldn’t recognize it. Think about it. So many fathers leaving...
Feb 1, 2024Economists, pundits, and politicians would write and say much wiser things if they would take a few minutes and consider the trajectory of California’s richest companies. Think...
Jan 30, 2024Seemingly lost on the myriad deficit hawks in our midst is that the extraction of wealth from the economy is the true governmental sin, and also the crisis. Whether the extraction is...
Jan 29, 2024Economies gain strength from periods of weakness, so do stock markets.
Jan 27, 2024“He’s a savant. That’s the only way I can say it.” Those are the words of Tee Martin, quarterbacks coach for the Baltimore Ravens, from an interview with...
Jan 26, 2024A headline earlier in the week indicated that the searching-for-a-purpose EU governing body would attempt to block Amazon’s purchase of iRobot. It would seem the EU is trying...
Jan 25, 2024It was in 2018 that the business media began seriously picking up on the massive business being created by Kylie Jenner. We should excuse the journalists. Figure that Jenner had...
Jan 24, 2024Have you ever heard of a city, state or country that’s thriving by virtue of being economically stuck in the past? Neither have I. It’s something to think about as...
Jan 24, 2024“I could buy whatever I want, an iPhone and a computer, AirPods and a Barbie Dreamhouse. A real Barbie Dreamhouse that’s big and has walls. It would be in Paris because...
Jan 23, 2024In speeches given to rapt audiences over the decades, Cato Institute distinguished senior fellow Jose Pinera has talked about the exciting implications of his time as Minister of...
Jan 22, 2024To focus on the Fed when it comes to prices is to engage in obnoxious non sequitur.
Jan 20, 2024The 20th century called and it wants the word crisis back, the first half of the 20th century in particular. Back then crises were truly terrifying. Think two world wars...
Jan 19, 2024Up front, I’m strongly of the view that “crypto” or “private money” will soon enough replace the dollar, euro, yuan, pound, Swiss franc, and any other...
Jan 17, 2024Reader A finished Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment last night, while Reader B completed Llama Llama Learns to Swim. Did Reader A and B do the same thing?...
Jan 16, 2024Imagine if Jeff Bezos had been born in 1864 instead of 1964. What a tragedy for Americans if so, and realistically for humankind. If born 100 years earlier there’s no debating...
Jan 15, 2024The 1970s inflation was true inflation, a currency devaluation that Arthur Burns passionately opposed.
Jan 11, 2024Professor Ellison has been called before the administrators at his Los Angeles-area prestige university. He’s offended yet another easily offended student. Ellison asks why...
Jan 10, 2024Billionaire investor and entrepreneur Ken Fisher routinely reminds people that if they’re aware of a looming crisis or calamity, that they should forget about it and move on....
Jan 9, 2024Ahead of the 2016 presidential vote, it was popular on the left and right to respectively say that if Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton won the election, the U.S. was finished as a...
Jan 8, 2024The Fed is powerless when it comes restraining the flow of resources to their highest purpose.
Jan 6, 2024There’s that saying that individuals shouldn’t stand in the way when the enemy is hanging himself. What’s true for individuals is arguably true in a commercial...
Jan 2, 2024Considering New York City, it’s no reach to suggest that apartment rents are one of the biggest concerns for voters there. That's no insight. The world’s most talented...