With over $12 trillion in negative-yielding debt and the yield on the ten-year Treasury bond falling below 1 percent for the first time, the days in which people could reliably count on a steady stream of income from their assets seem to be a thing of the past.
You knew it was bound to happen. Mainstream media organizations are using the novel coronavirus epidemic to open a new front on the War on Cash by trying to instill a fear of cash into the American public. As Nick Hankoff trenchantly writes:
It’s been a couple of days since my post on deaths per 100,000 in the USA and several other countries.
I’m very much a cautious “measure twice, cut once” type of person, so I went back and updated some of my calculations using more recent numbers.
Specifically, I’ve updated the third graph in the original post which is the number of deaths per 100,000 at the same point in the timeline since at least 1 case per million population was reported.
Our rulers want us to ignore the tried and true adage that cash is king in a crisis. The FDIC has just released a video exhorting people to keep their money in the banks. The spokesperson is the FDIC Chairman herself, Jelena McWilliams, who earnestly assures us: “Your money’s safe at the banks. The last thing you want to be doing is pulling your money out of the banks thinking it’s going to be safer some place else. . . .
It seems that a great many Americans pine for dictatorship. How else to explain the outrage over the fact that a member of Congress has requested that the Congress actually vote on the largest spending bill in human history? It seems the preferred method of lawmaking now is to have a small number of politicians decide law without the annoying formalities of legislative votes.
How can the Fed launch an “unlimited” monetary stimulus with congress approving a $2 trillion package and the dollar index remain strong? The answer lies in the rising global dollar shortage, and should be a lesson for monetary alchemists around the world.
The $2 trillion stimulus package agreed by Congress is around 10% of GDP and, if we include the Fed borrowing facilities for working capital, it means $6 trillion in liquidity for consumers and firms over the next nine months.
Eminent domain gives the government the power to take over private property for public use. A popular argument that this interference with private property is needed goes like this: We can’t measure subjective utility, but we can take increases in wealth as a rough proxy for increases in utility. (This assumption is mistaken, but I won’t get into that here.) Suppose, on this assumption, that some public project will add a great deal of wealth to the economy. Unfortunately, someone owns a small parcel of land necessary to get the project underway.
