In the 1964 film The Pawnbroker, Rod Steiger plays Sol Nazerman, a Holocaust survivor who operates a pawnshop in Harlem. In one memorable scene, his young assistant asks him what he believes in. “Money,” he answers. Money has extraordinary powers. It can buy comfort, luxury, relief from pain, sometimes even life itself. Then he adds, his anger driving him:
This week in New York, under the banner “Restoring trust, managing transformation,” the world’s diplomats convened for the 81st UN General Assembly and decided, somewhere between the wars and the climate panic, that artificial intelligence now belongs on the short list of things only they can save us from.
According to the non-aggression principle, aggressive violence is never justified. But stating the principle is the easy part. Identifying the aggressor is more difficult when the facts are contested and when both sides, in their respective political parties, claim to be “defending” themselves against their aggressive enemies.
Private market discipline is dynamic: prices adjust continuously as participants update their perceptions. Public prudential regulation is static: fixed rules define the playing field, and market participants optimize within those rules, arbitraging every gap. Once public regulation and ownership crowd out private discipline, political overseers add conflicting social objectives that further distort incentives. The 2008 crash was not a failure of free markets but the catastrophic consequence of unleashing Wall Street finance quants on a socialized housing market.
The Meaning of Socialism by Michael Luntley (Open Court, 1990; xviii + 206 pp.)
If one has any awareness of the Panic of 1837 at all, one has likely been treated to the conventional story, wherein—as usual—the economic crisis and ensuing depression were supposedly caused by a lack of sufficient government regulation. In this case, the blame falls largely on Andrew Jackson and his destruction of the Second Bank of the United States. According to this narrative, the Second Bank had served as a necessary restraint on state-bank credit expansion.
The precious metals markets made a big push last year through January before the Warsh nomination and the US started the Israeli war with Iran. That brought on a big correction that was due, in part, and then a bottoming pattern began with gold in the 4,500 to 4,000 range, with silver in the 55-to-70-dollar range.
The nickel is now the smallest denomination coin made for circulation by the United States Mint. At five cents, it is ten times the accounting value of America’s first small coin—the half cent. And “small” is a bit of a misnomer, as the first half cents issued by the United States were 22 mm in diameter, almost as big as today’s 24.3 mm quarters! Made of 6.74 grams of pure copper, the half cent was worth its weight in copper.
