Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently took to X to celebrate what he called one of the “highlights of the Warsh Fed.” His post didn’t have anything to do with what kind of monetary policy a Warsh-chaired Fed will do. It was about the humiliation of mainstream financial journalists—which is fine by me, but let me digress on “Fed independence” between mouthfuls of popcorn.
“Many products of Western European societies, from coins to castles, moved eastward in medieval times. So did more advanced agricultural methods, such as improved plows, the horse collar, and new systems of crop rotation. Germans living in Eastern Europe became in effect enclaves of Western European culture there. The landed nobility of Eastern Europe often deliberately attracted German farmers by allowing them to settle in towns and villages under German laws.
As Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever drove toward the basket for a seemingly easy breakaway layup, DiJonai Carrington of the Chicago Sky bore down on her. Carrington, an aggressive defender, is well-known in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) for blocking shots from behind, but this potential block had no potential at all.
“Trying to defer America’s fiscal reckoning by monkeying with debt instruments is the trick used by broken hegemons through the ages. It is a Faustian pact.”
As Trump’s “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth demands a fifty-percent increase to the war budget—topping an eye watering $1.5 trillion—it may be instructive to remember that war spending has always and everywhere been the primary enemy of sound money. Some advocates of the warfare state like to lay the blame on social spending, but it has historically been wars that end up ruining currencies and blowing the top off the public fisc.
The total fertility rate needed to sustain a population is 2.1. Averaged over 2020–2024, South Korea’s stands at 0.78, Taiwan’s at 0.89, and Hong Kong’s at 0.79.
In a recent interview with The Economist, Elon Musk boldly contended that “money won’t matter in 2036.” He went on to argue that humans want money for goods and services. He then said, “Well, if that [goods/services are]. . .so abundant that. . .the robots and AI are providing more goods and services than any human could possibly consume, what do you need money for in that case?”
Around two and a half years ago, as the Biden administration was entering what we now know was its final year, the then-president’s re-election campaign was growing frustrated.
According to nearly all the big economic indicators and aggregates, the economy was doing quite well, especially considering the historic shutdown governments had forced on the global economy a few years before.
