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Oct 22, 2024
“Why can’t you pulverize the market just by buying the stocks with the highest share prices?” The previous question was asked by Jason Zweig, author of the rather...
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Oct 21, 2024
The always and everywhere goal of tax policy should be to limit the flow of dollars to Washington.
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Oct 19, 2024
After a successful head coaching career that included a .668 winning percentage (148-79), and one Super Bowl appearance (a victory), Tony Dungy was voted into the NFL Hall of Fame....
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Oct 18, 2024
There’s a price for every good and service. Always and everywhere. This is a notable point at the moment, and in light of the never-ending talk about whether home insurers will...
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Oct 17, 2024
Uber really started to become a thing in 2012. It was a spectacular revelation.
Gone were the days of worrying about calling a cab or hailing one in order to get to the airport....
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Oct 17, 2024
Do you the reader transact with cryptocurrencies? Do you store wealth in them?
Particularly if the answer is no, it’s useful to think about such an answer in light of a recent...
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Oct 16, 2024
“They’re on track to becoming the richest person on earth eventually.” Those are the words of Cullen Hoback, creator of a new HBO documentary (“Money...
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Oct 15, 2024
The protectionist attacks on TikTok continue, this time care of thirteen state attorneys general and the District of Columbia. The New York Times reports that the multi-state lawsuit...
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Oct 14, 2024
As the Friedman video circulates to an ever-wider audience, understanding of inflation is in decline.
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Oct 12, 2024
Founded in 1868, Wayne State University is located in Detroit. It’s no insight to write that it’s a lesser-known Michigan college relative to University of Michigan,...
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Oct 11, 2024
For the longest time banks have relied on the law to protect the private property of their account holders. Ironically, those same banks increasingly find themselves in the...
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Oct 10, 2024
Back in the early 1990s, an oil-change service business ran a clever ad campaign which said “We’re not trying to change your oil, we’re trying to change your...
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Oct 9, 2024
Bikes were “as indispensable to a Chinese as a car to twentieth century Americans.” Those are the words of Fox Butterfield from Alive In the Bitter Sea, his 1982 book...
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Oct 8, 2024
Responding to the failures of Enron and Worldcom within six months of each other, failures that didn’t spook the markets much at all, President George W. Bush zestily signed...
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Oct 7, 2024
At least stopped clocks are right twice a day.
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Oct 5, 2024
A scroll through ESPN.com last Saturday afternoon revealed a bit of a shocker. #6 Ole Miss had lost to unranked Kentucky, 20-17.
Trite as it sounds, muscle memory of sorts brought on...
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Oct 4, 2024
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has taken to blaming the Republicans for problems associated with a surge of immigrants at the southern border. Republicans have hit...
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Oct 3, 2024
“We don’t take American Express.” Those five words kept coming to mind last week while reading about the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) antitrust case again...
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Oct 2, 2024
“And it’s paid for by you. No billionaires will fund work like this because there’s no money in it. This is government-funded research to determine how the universe...
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Oct 1, 2024
It was reported last week that Paul Pelosi, husband of former House Speaker Nancy, recently sold a sizable amount of Visa stock. Actually, it wasn’t that recent. July 1st to be...
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Sep 30, 2024
Debt is a just a symptom.
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Sep 28, 2024
Last week the New York Times reported on labor unrest among the musicians at the New York Philharmonic, America’s oldest orchestra. Currently paid $153,504 annually, the...
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Sep 27, 2024
The legendary Boeing 747 was a brilliant consequence of six million different parts produced by man and machine around the world. Absent this wildly sophisticated division of labor,...
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Sep 26, 2024
It wasn’t long after Donald Trump’s recent proposal to reverse his $10,000 cap on the State and Local Tax deduction (otherwise known as SALT) that critics on his right...
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Sep 25, 2024
According to a recently released report from the New York Fed, Americans collectively owe over $1.1 trillion on their credit cards. Reports like this have a tendency to elicit bad...
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Sep 23, 2024
Economists with their cheerleading of Fed price controls are like the drunk doctor at the party grabbing women where they shouldn’t under the guise of being a doctor.
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Sep 21, 2024
Songwriter extraordinaire Burt Bacharach died in 2023 at the age of 94. In a recent New York Times interview of Herb Alpert, the musician extraordinaire looked back to 2021 when...
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Sep 20, 2024
As wealth grows, so grow efforts to separate those who possess wealth from it. Reports in recent years indicate that, among other things, thieves have gone so far as to steal...
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Sep 19, 2024
Without defending some (or a lot) of its anti-growth economic policies, the easily-forgotten truth is that California is by far the most enterprising, entrepreneurial state in the...
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Sep 18, 2024
“China’s technology boom was forged to a remarkable extent by American investors.” Those are the words of Sebastian Mallaby, from his excellent 2022 history of...
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Sep 17, 2024
So long as Americans are talented, U.S.-based growth will be abundant, and will take place without regard to what the Fed does.
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Sep 17, 2024
You know how the best NBA and MLB teams spend enormous sums of money scouting talent around the world? The best U.S. corporations do the same. A failure to do so comes at the cost of...
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Sep 16, 2024
So long as Americans are talented, U.S.-based growth will be abundant, and will take place without regard to what the Fed does.
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Sep 14, 2024
Elon Musk recently revived the notion of “government efficiency.” No, there’s no such thing. Always and everywhere there’s no such thing. It’s a mirage....
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Sep 13, 2024
“But in May 2015, Beijing went public with a 10-year plan to dominate high-value, high-technology sectors – with the unspoken goal of destroying America’s economic...
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Sep 12, 2024
Top Gun: Maverick was released on May 27, 2022. The view here is that the movie was boring, trite, and even quite “woke” despite a popular perception that it trampled on...
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Sep 11, 2024
Oaktree Capital co-founder Howard Marks has long made the essential point (referenced here regularly) that the seeds of bad times are planted during the good, and good times during...
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Sep 11, 2024
What a shame if some of the contestants have their ability to compete shrunk not by competition, but by regulatory decree, regulatory favoritism, or both.
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Sep 10, 2024
A conservative editorial recently speculated that the Kamala Harris presidential campaign “is betting the press won’t care” about her “past political views,...
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Sep 9, 2024
Equity markets always and everywhere attain lift from the ferocious replacement of the past.
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Sep 7, 2024
Are they really laying the groundwork for more of the “the Russians did it”? About the previous question, “they” is the Democrats, and “the...
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Sep 6, 2024
“Think about your most embarrassing moment. Then multiply it many times. That’s what it feels like when your clients are losing money.” The latter is a paraphrase...
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Sep 5, 2024
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have both said that if elected president, they will block Nippon Steel’s planned, $14.9 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel. They’re not...
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Sep 4, 2024
Consumption is an always effect of what actually matters: production. It’s a reminder that while “supply siders” are increasingly ridiculous, “supply-side...
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Sep 3, 2024
The great Charles Murray writes that “Every advanced nation has a small group of people who have the potential to accelerate scientific progress and the advances that go with...
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Sep 2, 2024
There are no limits to production and the credit expansion that is a brilliant consequence of production.
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Aug 31, 2024
In grade school one of my classmates talked of having lived in El Paso before moving to southern California. Apparently the heat in west Texas was intense, so intense that an egg...
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Aug 30, 2024
Coco Cay, Bahamas – Royal Caribbean’s Utopia of the Seas cruise ship had its maiden voyage just last month. Construction of what exceeds 1,100 feet in length took place...
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Aug 29, 2024
The “Showtime” Los Angeles Lakers of the 1980s always seemed so happy. This was particularly bothersome to me as a Boston Celtics fan growing up in the Los Angeles area....
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Aug 28, 2024
According to University of Chicago economics professor Casey Mulligan, what he deems “inflation” was actually instigated by then Vice President Kamala Harris. Wow! Who...
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Aug 27, 2024
Prices are information. Plain and simple. That’s why governmental attempts to distort prices, or make them artificially cheap, always result in shortages of the market good or...
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Aug 26, 2024
Rising government debt is much more likely to correlate with a lack of inflation.
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Aug 24, 2024
“A revolutionary approach is taking shape: using the combined power of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing to steer fusion innovation, shaving decades off...
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Aug 23, 2024
It’s so easy to forget that we pay for products with products. It’s not that we bring the fruits of our labor to Whataburger, but it’s that we have money to...
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Aug 22, 2024
Quick: what will people do for a living in the future? How will market goods be transported to increasingly acquisitive and impatient customers? How will law enforcement protect...
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Aug 21, 2024
“When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.” There’s no documented evidence that the great 19th century free thinker Frederic Bastiat penned or spoke the...
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Aug 20, 2024
Millennials will be richest generation in the history of the richest nation in the history of the world. If you recognize the previous assertion, then you have a good memory. It was...
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Aug 19, 2024
When it comes to the Fed, all inviolable laws of the market vanish from the minds of conservatives.
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Aug 17, 2024
Tipping has gotten a bad rap of late. Lots of op-eds and commentary more broadly from left and right about tips, and perhaps worse, the expectation of tips.
The view here is that...
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Aug 16, 2024
Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) aren’t paid nearly enough. And that’s an understatement.
Such a view will no doubt incense those prone to thinking negatively about...
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Aug 15, 2024
The richest demographic in the U.S. right now is 55 and up. That’s why there would be more growth in Donald Trump’s “SENIORS SHOULD NOT PAY TAX ON SOCIAL...
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Aug 14, 2024
Tech visionary Susan Wojcicki died of lung cancer on August 9th. It’s always sad anytime someone dies too early, but it’s especially sad that Wojcicki won’t get to...
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Aug 13, 2024
At RiskHedge, Stephen McBride writes of “the biggest infrastructure buildout” ever as technology companies spend enormous sums to power AI advances that will result in...
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Aug 12, 2024
Readers can decide whom to take seriously, and whom to dismiss with utmost disdain.
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Aug 10, 2024
“[My mother] always believed that a career in the arts was a noble profession. And that was a very rare point of view.” Those are the words of Pixar legend (Monsters...
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Aug 9, 2024
“Drunk on credit.” This is James Grant’s new/old take on problems in the economy.
To make his decades-long case, Grant looks back to 1974 and .10 cent beer night at...
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Aug 8, 2024
If you weren’t aware until the debate with Donald Trump that President Biden is very much a senior citizen, that’s your fault. It’s similarly your fault if you...
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Aug 7, 2024
It makes no sense whatsoever that “recession fears” are the cause of the recent stock-market carnage. To believe this narrative is to believe that investors rewarded for...
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Aug 5, 2024
The alleged inflation "seers" are revealing themselves as either clueless about what inflation is, dishonest about it, or both.
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Aug 3, 2024
“I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured.” Those are the words of Ronald Rowe Jr., acting head of the Secret Service, while testifying before Congress.
Sen....
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Aug 2, 2024
“The Fed is no longer the backstop to the financial system on a dark day. It’s the dominant player day in and day out.” Those are the dispiriting words of former...
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Aug 1, 2024
The problem with policy is policy. This is easily forgotten by both Democrats and Republicans promising utopia via legislation.
Think California’s policymaking in the area of...
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Jul 31, 2024
Senior Biden officials actively leaned on the most popular U.S. social media sites to restrain what they deemed “misinformation” about the novel coronavirus, along with...
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Jul 30, 2024
The act of short-selling is arguably the riskiest one in all of capitalism, and certainly the riskiest one in all of investing. That’s true simply because there’s...
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Jul 29, 2024
If the question appears flippant, that’s because it is.
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Jul 27, 2024
“If I am going to spend time somewhere, it probably will be a gym because that’s what I love doing.” Those are the words of Baltimore Ravens running-back, Derrick...
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Jul 26, 2024
Benefits for Starbucks employees include 100% payment of college tuition and fees, health insurance, and surely other perks not mentioned here. Starbucks corporate and its...
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Jul 25, 2024
Shein is a Singapore-based clothier that makes clothes in just-in-time fashion as a way of it relentlessly trying to mirror the needs and styles of its users. While future brides...
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Jul 25, 2024
The Association of American Railroads reports that the first inter-city railroad was the 13-mile Baltimore and Ohio, finished in 1830. Notable about the completion of this then...
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Jul 24, 2024
A certain sign of country prosperity is the ubiquity of foreign goods and businesses in that country. Markets are wise, and it’s in the countries where foreign producers are...
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Jul 23, 2024
When Sunday began, donors were closing their checkbooks to President Biden. This is notable simply because the major Democratic Party donors are rich.
Except that rich people...
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Jul 22, 2024
A falling dollar is a tax on investment that mutes the discovery of the future as a consequence.
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Jul 20, 2024
It’s accepted wisdom that in the matchup of Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden, voters despise their options. Supposedly Trump is the only individual Biden could beat, and supposedly...
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Jul 19, 2024
There’s a myth that just won’t die about fast-food chains going out of their way to underpay their employees. In reality, and as is the case with all industry...
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Jul 18, 2024
“What is harmful or disastrous to an individual must be equally harmful to the collection of individuals that make up a nation.” – Henry...
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Jul 17, 2024
Up front, thank goodness the shooter missed, that Donald Trump turned at just the right time, or both. As some reading this remember well, or have come to know through their reading,...
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Jul 16, 2024
“We are not going to allow big banks to discriminate based on someone’s political or religious beliefs.” Those words come to us from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, amid...
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Jul 15, 2024
Here lies the error, one of many, in using market prices as a proxy for what is always and everywhere a currency phenomenon.
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Jul 13, 2024
Policy experts need to cease shouting at Argentinean president Javier Milei to “dollarize.” He can do no such thing. Milei can only get government out of the way so that...
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Jul 12, 2024
The people are enduring triple digit heat in Karachi. A not insignificant number of them are dying in what is Pakistan’s largest city.
That Pakistanis are suffering horrific...
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Jul 11, 2024
“He’s a savant. That’s the only way I can say it.” That’s how Tee Martin, quarterbacks coach for the Baltimore Ravens, described Ravens’...
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Jul 10, 2024
Policy types are invariably looking into the past, and their tendency to do this is rooted in a wildly flawed conceit that they’re smarter than the markets. They're not. They...
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Jul 9, 2024
The envious in our midst routinely spill a lot of ink and angst about “hidden wealth.” Their view is that global tax havens and other so-called “tax...
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Jul 8, 2024
The higher prices that followed Covid precisely make Biden’s case. Biden’s problem is that he doesn’t know how to make it. Neither do his advisers.
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Jul 6, 2024
Leading up to the recent NBA Draft, it was reported that some of the smart money in the betting markets had Bronny James, son of LeBron, being picked #1. The reason this was news...
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Jul 5, 2024
In his excellent 2022 book Unreasonable Hospitality, restaurateur Will Guidara recalled his extraordinary attention to detail while operating Eleven Madison Park on its path to best...
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Jul 4, 2024
“I probably would have hit 40 each year.” Those are the words of the late, great Willie Mays. He was talking about the 80 home runs he believed he would have hit if...
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Jul 3, 2024
During the graduation season that just passed, a sign at a nearby gas station flashed a message on its digital screen for graduating high school seniors: “Make Good...
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Jul 2, 2024
It cannot be stressed enough that the corporation as a taxpaying entity is a fiction. And the previous assertion should in no way be construed as a suggestion that corporations pay...
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Jul 1, 2024
Demand and supply mirror each other such that there could never be too much demand or supply, and by extension, neither have anything to do with inflation.
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Jun 28, 2024
In his memoir Setting the Table, restaurateur Danny Meyer recalls telling friends in the 1980s that he was leaving his high-paying job for restaurant work. Those he told would shift...
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Jun 27, 2024
Well, you could see this one coming from miles away... What’s that? Nobel economists using the GOP’s new definition of “inflation” to critique Donald...
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Jun 26, 2024
Economists are naturally fearful of ill economic feelings. That is so because they’re near monolithically Keynesian, or what they imagine Keynes to have been. According to...
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Jun 25, 2024
The division of labor is the greatest friend of the worker that mankind has ever known. Nothing else comes close. Extra people or machines don’t ever take jobs from humans as...
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Jun 24, 2024
The classical thinkers would reject what is, and always has been, facile.
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Jun 22, 2024
Do you know those people who refuse to tip with anything but cash? They'll do anything to keep money from government, to the point of being annoying. Count yours truly as one of...
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Jun 21, 2024
Thank goodness for Bret Stephens. Think about it. While most who lean right protest left-leaning views about economic policy far from those who create it and support it, Stephens...
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Jun 20, 2024
Mother bears are well known to attack and kill on site any other living creature that comes near their cubs. Protection of the babies is seared in the mother bear’s DNA it...
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Jun 19, 2024
In Harrison Smith’s excellent Washington Post obituary for Dallas Cowboys great Larry Allen, he noted that when Allen was inducted into the Cowboys Ring of Honor, his...
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Jun 18, 2024
We learn by doing. No doubt we attend college and major in whatever discipline we think we might be interested in, but dynamic economies in no way wait for academics to catch up with...
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Jun 17, 2024
It's as though the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was designed by Democrats.
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Jun 15, 2024
“Tech is maximally tolerant of any personality if you’re delivering.” Those are the words of Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies. And they speak to a beautiful...
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Jun 14, 2024
It’s too easily ignored that macroeconomics is a myth, a false notion presuming that what we call an “economy” is a living, breathing, tangible blob. In reality, an...
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Jun 13, 2024
Those who tout credit cards over debit cards claim usage of the latter is tantamount to giving away one’s money. Conversely, charge cards offer cash-back plans, airline miles,...
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Jun 13, 2024
Banks are in the business of competing for savings. They “rent” savings in order to carefully lend those savings out. Simple truths like this are sometimes easily...
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Jun 12, 2024
Last month it was reported (yet again) that Social Security will run out of money in 2035. And as is frequently the case with news items like this, pundit-class alarmists spilled all...
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Jun 11, 2024
The cancellation of Jennifer Lopez’s “troubled summer tour” has generated lots of media coverage. Concert-venue screenshots have made their way around social media...
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Jun 10, 2024
The miracle is that the price of a Big Mac isn't much higher.
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Jun 8, 2024
It’s better when companies are public. When they are, management is the recipient of minute by minute, hour by hour opinion from the knowledge-pregnant marketplace. Call share...
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Jun 7, 2024
The late Robert Novak’s 2013 memoir The Prince of Darkness was endlessly interesting, but also tiring in an odd way. Seemingly every day he went to Duke Ziebert’s for...
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Jun 6, 2024
It’s easily forgotten that around the turn of the century, Palm’s valuation was greater than that of Amazon, Apple and Nvidia combined. To which more than a few readers...
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Jun 5, 2024
Let’s imagine for fun you the reader approaching an investor or lender about a business concept the fruits of which will generate proceeds that merely pay back what the...
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Jun 4, 2024
“I needed cash…I spent most of every day thinking about liquidity, talking about liquidity, looking to the heavens and pleading for liquidity. My kingdom for...
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Jun 3, 2024
What an odd solution, empowering the central planning of one of the most important prices in the world as a way to bring down prices. Economists never disappoint.
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Jun 1, 2024
In his 2001 book The Elusive Quest for Growth, former World Bank officer William Easterly showed readers what a billion Argetine pesos in the 1950s had shrunk to by the 1990s. What...
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May 31, 2024
An old friend from college is part of a family that until recently owned a very large retail operation with stores throughout the Midwest. A few years ago the family sold the...
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May 30, 2024
It was in 2009 that Uber began serving customers in San Francisco. To show what low odds Uber and its early investors placed on its survival, in 2011 the then-nascent ride-hailing...
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May 29, 2024
Why do retailers accept credit cards and debit cards? It’s sad such a facile question requires asking, but at a time when fees associated with credit and debit usage are being...
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May 28, 2024
American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) senior research fellow Paul Mueller writes with AIER research fellow Thomas Savidge that “Pulling money from asset managers who...
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May 27, 2024
Drowning in theories that don't stand up to reality.
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May 25, 2024
“Some monopolies are just so entrenched, and some problems so difficult to address, that they require decisive and effective solutions.” Those are the words of Jonathan...
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May 24, 2024
Go to any library anywhere in the United States and you’ll almost invariably be able to find picture books, along with framed pictures on the walls of how things used to be in...
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May 23, 2024
What happens to “demand” if a billionaire lives in austere fashion? The answer is that thrift doesn’t shrink demand one iota. The same applies if a machine produces...
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May 22, 2024
Pretty In Pink was released on February 28, 1986. The John Hughes film about high school and teen angst included one of the first film-based hints of the technological future that...
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May 22, 2024
“Banks should act like banks, not like political activists that are hostile to our state, our citizens, and our economy.” Those are the words of Ken Paxton, the attorney...
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May 21, 2024
“Do you honestly think you’re going to replace this?” “This” was a thick phone book, or “Yellow Pages”, which on its own requires...
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May 20, 2024
If you’re laughing at Jared Bernstein you’re likely the butt of the joke yourself.
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May 18, 2024
A simple search on Google indicates that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has roughly $167 billion in cash or cash equivalents.
That one of the world’s foremost...
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May 17, 2024
It’s always amusing to hear about college students majoring in “entrepreneurialism,” or better yet, individuals who express a plan to be an entrepreneur....
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May 16, 2024
The federal government should never have funded Operation Warp Speed, the 2020 central plan quarterbacked by the Trump administration to rush a coronavirus-vaccine to the people....
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May 15, 2024
How quickly opinions change. The Masterpiece Cake Shop comes to mind. Not terribly long ago the owners of the Lakewood, CO small business were asked to bake a cake for a same-sex...
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May 15, 2024
They say that the NFL is the ultimate copycat league. No doubt that’s true. What’s successful is invariably imitated.
One of the most frequent ways in which copycatting...
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May 14, 2024
Economists incorrectly believe consumption powers economic growth. Actually, consumption is a consequence of economic growth. To believe consumption powers growth is the equivalent...
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May 13, 2024
“It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” The previous quote, perhaps apocryphal, relates to a battle over Ben Tre in Vietnam. It comes to mind as...
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May 13, 2024
To say economists disappoint surely flatters them.
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May 11, 2024
“How big is the sun? We just heard right this minute a million of our earths could all fit right in it.” Those words can be found in Dr. Seuss children’s book...
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May 10, 2024
If you’re looking for negative commentary about your retirement prospects, you don’t need to look far, or dig too deeply. Predictions of desperation for the elderly of...
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May 9, 2024
There’s a question I’ve always wanted to ask musicians, famous ones like Paul McCartney in particular: When in the car, do they listen to their own songs when they come...
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May 9, 2024
Back in the 1990s and 2000s Amazon’s valuation continued to rise despite quarter after quarter of losses. The answer to this seeming oddity was that investors were looking into...
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May 8, 2024
“I’ve been reading these cover to cover since the 1960s.” So said foreign policy eminence and novelist Mark Helprin in his interview with the great Barton Swaim in...
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May 7, 2024
Mike Ditka grew up in Aliquippa, PA, a town most famous for high school football and J & L Steel. Ditka’s father worked J&L’s mills as did seemingly the majority...
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May 7, 2024
After a couple of subpar seasons in the 1980s, the late and legendary Washington Huskies football coach Don James instructed his assistants to bring their own stopwatches on...
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May 6, 2024
All high prices are transitory.
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May 4, 2024
Ken Auletta long ago described New York City as “the final test” for the ambitious. More famously, Frank Sinatra sang about New York that “if I can make it there, I...
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May 3, 2024
Responding back in 2022 to Meta’s planned acquisition of virtual reality start-up Within, FTC Chair Lina Khan stepped in to block the purchase since it would allegedly bring...
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May 2, 2024
Looks can be deceiving. Don’t judge a book by its cover. The grass isn’t always greener. Insert your line here for responses to the presumption that someone has it...
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May 1, 2024
“As soon as you stop attacking the oil and gas industry and as soon as you stop pushing a political agenda with our pension funds we are happy to do business with...
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May 1, 2024
Stop and think for a moment what your living standards would resemble if you had to build the house you live in, grow and raise the food you eat, sew the clothes you wear, and cut...
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Apr 30, 2024
A report in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal indicated that “Former Trump administration officials” have been discussing “a range of proposals,” including...
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Apr 29, 2024
The “general price level” is always flat.
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Apr 26, 2024
In his 2006 book Who Really Cares, Arthur Brooks wrote of how the late Robert Byrd’s generosity with the money of others could be found all over the state of West Virginia....
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Apr 25, 2024
Legendary and visionary retailer Sam Walton not only had a private airplane in the early days of Walmart, he also piloted it to Walmart stores throughout the south. On those trips,...
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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 Pete G. Peterson Foundation is running billboard ads in Washington, D.C. about - you guessed it - the federal debt. The ads read something like this: Each Day It Costs a Billion...
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Apr 23, 2024
Let the flow of people and corporations decide the good, bad or in between of employment contracts.
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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.”...
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Mar 4, 2024
You quite simply cannot recreate a miracle of intricate cooperation on a global scale within a week, months, or years.
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...