The increase in the Federal debt beyond $40 trillion triggered a chorus of false claims regarding fiscal policy and Federal debt sustainability. This morning on CSPAN, Josh Bivens echoed recent remarks From Paul Krugman and Jared Bernstein.
“A defence start-up whose backers include US tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund is building a trio of factories in the US.”
Shortly after becoming the new Fed chairman, Kevin Warsh has admitted that it’s been more than five years since the Federal Reserve hit its two-percent price-inflation target. Warsh has also claimed that he’ll change that, and he’ll bring down price inflation very soon. But if Warsh is serious about price inflation he’s going to have to make some pretty substantial changes. After all, the Fed’s preferred price-inflation measure (core PCE) was up by 3.7 percent, year over year, in the most recent data from July.
Last Monday, a day before the Republican-controlled House passed a resolution condemning socialism, the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital announced that it had acquired a 35 percent stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, one of Venezuela’s largest private oil producers.
In the deal, the Venezuela government gives the company a hundred years lease for some oil fields. The deal also provides the US government with veto power over appointments to the company’s board of directors. Having power over appointments to the board gives the US government control over the company.
For over half a century, American public policy has been dominated by a singular sociological axiom: that any statistical disparity in socioeconomic outcomes between demographic groups is prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination. To remedy these imbalances, a massive federal bureaucracy—working alongside heavily-subsidized activist networks—has institutionalized top-down legal remedies ranging from affirmative action to disparate-impact regulations.
In 2026 the late Cuban President Fidel Castro would have turned 100 and his deceased predecessor President Fulgencio Batista would be 125. Fidel died in 2016 at 90 and Fulgencio died in exile in 1973 at 72. Each leader’s past economic policy decisions impacted Cuba’s economy and history in 2026. The study of the policies of these two dead Cuban political leaders is worth remembering.
As the official federal debt hit the $40 trillion mark and attracted a lot of negative publicity, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to reassure CNBC’s Sara Eisen in an August 20 interview that there is nothing to worry about:
Bubble alert: more than half of the 4,454 CEO respondents said “their companies aren’t yet seeing a financial return from investments in AI.”
The tourism sector is one of Cuba’s principal sources of foreign exchange earnings, which has long been a target of US sanctions policy. That said, recent measures enacted by the Trump administration to restrict tourism-related revenue have been designed to deprive the Cuban economy of the hard currency needed to finance imports of food, medicines, fuel, and other essential goods. The end goal is to intensify economic pressure on the government, while also having broader effects on the daily lives of ordinary Cubans.
