The occurrence of stagflation is associated with a situation of general strengthening in the momentum of prices while at the same time the pace of economic activity is declining. A famous stagflation episode occurred during the 1974û75 period, as year-on-year industrial production fell by nearly 13 percent in March 1975 while the yearly growth rate of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) jumped to around 12 percent. Likewise, a large fall in economic activity and galloping price inflation was observed during 1979.

Raymond Geuss is an influential political philosopher, and I hope to review his new book, Not Thinking Like a Liberal,(Harvard, 2022) on another occasion.  Geuss is a confirmed enemy of liberalism, both classical and modern, He dislikes both Rawls and Nozick; in fact, his attitude toward Rawls falls little short of hatred. This interferes with his ability to read these thinkers with care.  He says that one feature he dislikes  of the way philosophy has come to be done  ”is the one which Robert Nozick described in the preface to one of his books.

As Russian political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky has quite rightly said, one should not consider the five-thousand-plus sanctions imposed against the Russian Federation as of this writing as sanctions in the normal diplomatic and economic sense. They are a conditional “second front,” a blow aimed at dismantling the Russian economy, the Russian social structure, and the institutional framework in response to the corresponding actions of the Russian authorities, with the West’s clearly stated position not to mirror such actions.

Two new faces were recently sworn into the Fed’s inner circle, Dr. Lisa Cook and Dr. Philip N. Jefferson, whom I wrote about in January when Biden nominated them.