On Sunday night, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell announced that Trump’s Department of Justice had served the Fed with grand jury subpoenas, threatening a criminal indictment of Powell.
The subpoenas concern statements Powell made to the Senate Banking Committee last summer about renovations to the Eccles Building—the Fed’s headquarters in Washington, DC.
President Donald Trump last week stated that he would ask Congress for a $1.5 trillion defense budget in 2027, an enormous $500 billion increase over 2026’s military budget. The proposed spending increase reflects how much the Trump administration has become focused on pushing new wars, and how much the White House loves to spend taxpayer money.
The long-boiling tensions between the Trump administration and Jerome Powell’s Federal Reserve escalated over the weekend, with a New York Times report and subsequent public statement from Powell over the opening of a federal indictment about alleged false statements regarding Federal Reserve building renovations.
[Editor’s note: 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and this year we will be featuring many of Murray Rothbard’s work on the American Revolution and its meaning. In this essay, Rothbard touches on many themes we find on his work on American history, such as his contention that the abandonment of the Articles of Confederation by the “founding fathers” was a counterrevolution against the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.]
Net present value (NPV) is a popular decision-making criteria used by firms to make key, crucial choices about how to allocate resources across an economy. Net present value forecasts temporally discount future cash flows to their present value to check whether a project creates value. If a project has an NPV greater than zero, it creates value. On the other hand, if a project has an NPV less than zero, the project loses value.
“What did you know, and when did you know it?”—Eugene D. Genovese, “The Question”
In “The Question” from 1994, historian Genovese addressed those who—like himself—supported the Soviet Union despite knowing the truths of that evil regime. He asked fellow communists and travelers to look inside themselves and answer the question with honesty.
Friedrich von Hayek explains in his article “Why I am Not a Conservative” that, given a choice between the progressive parties that destroy liberty, and the conservative parties that defend the status quo, the classical liberal will “generally have little choice but to support the conservative parties.” This is because there are many parallels between the classical liberal prioritization of individual liberty and the conservative principle of limited government in countries with a tradition o
The New York Times today reports that the US Attorney’s office in the District of Columbia has opened a criminal investigation into Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. Ostensibly and officially, the investigation is into the nature of the Federal Reserve’s renovation of its Washington headquarters, and whether or not Powell lied to Congress about the scope of the project. In the world of politics, stated reasons rarely match the actual reasons, however.
In his press conference on January 3 concerning the arrest of Venezuelan “narco-dictator” Nicolas Maduro, President Donald Trump talked about US oil companies restoring the former productivity of Venezuela’s oil industry and using that money for 1) compensation for the nationalization of the industry a couple decades ago; and, 2) (somehow) benefiting the people of Venezuela.
