In a free market, the interest rate does one essential job: it tells the truth about time. When households save more, they express a preference for consuming later rather than now. The supply of loanable funds rises, interest rates fall, and entrepreneurs receive an accurate signal that real resources have been freed up for longer-term investment. The production structure lengthens—more capital-intensive projects become viable—and the economy’s capacity expands sustainably.

Autonomous AI agents are becoming active economic participants on both sides of market transactions. Enterprise platforms now embed what vendors call “touchless operations,” with agents executing procurement decisions without human review. Blockchain networks let AI agents hold wallets, settle payments, and rebalance portfolios autonomously.

With an American imprimatur, Israel is on a “genocidal rampage” in Southern Lebanon, where it blew-up 350 human beings in the span of minutes, on April 9.

In spite of more than four years of claiming that price inflation was transitory, and that it would quickly return to the Fed’s two-percent target, the Fed has insisted on more easy-money policy over the past 18 months. In that time, the Fed has cut the target interest rate by 175 basis points and has returned to quantitative easing through monthly $40 billion purchases of Treasurys.

You can trust the prolific and ever-entertaining British author Dominic Frisby to produce a most timely book on a most relevant asset class. In The Secret History of Gold: Myth, Money, Politics & Power, released last year in Britain but only available in the US from May, this excellent writer and storyteller takes us along on a truly epic journey.

Many people think that evolution undermines objective ethics. How can we say that ethical judgments are true or false, if these judgments arise from evolution by natural selection? Evolution is concerned only with what enhances reproductive success. To the extent that genes that lead to certain behavior give a selective advantage to their carriers, they will tend to spread through the population. If this explains why we act, this appears to leave no room for explaining ethical behavior though its conformity to truth.