By late in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we could say that the long-term US interest rate market had been dysfunctional for a long time. We could identify the starting point as being the immediate aftermath of the Nasdaq bust and recession of 2000/01.

In his first year in office, President Joe Biden has made it absolutely clear that he wants to make the oil and natural gas industries disappear. While even a progressive like Biden knows that it would be economically (and, one would hope, politically) disastrous to destroy those industries during his brief term, nonetheless Biden is setting things into motion in which the regulatory and law enforcement apparatus of the central government are quietly but effectively declaring war on what has been one of the most productive industries in US history.

In the economy, real economic return on investment is not just an important metric. It is crucial. That is why I find it so intellectually dishonest when some economists look at the GDP and employment growth without putting it in the context of the massive increase in debt, spending, and money supply.

A stimulus plan is supposed to generate higher and faster growth than the normal trend would dictate. Furthermore, the definition of a stimulus plan is that it should improve the long-term trend.

Any freshman economics major can attest that nobody gets through their introductory economics courses without learning the theory of public goods and the so-called free-rider problem. As espoused by Paul Samuelson in the 1950s, public goods are consumed collectively, therefore making them nonrivalrous and nonexcludable—or, putting aside economic jargon, consumers do not compete against each other for such goods and producers cannot regulate access to them. In consequence, “free riders” can enjoy public goods without contributing to the cost of production.

At a meeting with Joe Biden and other CEOs last week, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon predicted a global catastrophe if the debt ceiling is not raised.

This year’s Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, Joshua Angrist of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Guido Imbens of Stanford University. The laureates, according to the Nobel Committee have made an important contribution as to how to ascertain cause and effect from observational data.