The Lead-Up to the Plaza Accord

To understand the Plaza Accord, one has to look back to August 15, 1971. On this day Richard Nixon closed the gold window. This step de facto ended the Bretton Woods system, which had been created in 1944 in the New Hampshire town of the same name and was formally terminated in 1973. The era of gold-backed currency was well and truly over; the era of flexible exchange rates had begun. Without a gold anchor, the exchange rate of every currency pair was supposed to be driven exclusively by supply and demand.

“At birth human infants regardless of their heredity, are as equal as Fords,” wrote Ludwig von Mises in his salient book, Theory and History: The Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution. However, Mises contended that this is far from the reality of human action and how flesh-and-blood people operate in the market. While people may be born with particular talents and abilities, it does not mean they can ignore market preferences and what consumer’s value at any particular point in time.

Things are about to get noisy in Burlington, Vermont. No, it’s not a rally for the state’s Brooklyn-born junior senator. After some pomp including a “mini air-show,” the first two of 20 F-35s have begun settling into their new home at Vermont’s Air National Guard base, located at the Burlington Airport.

UNICEF this month released new data on infant and child mortality. As expected, the data shows continued declines in mortality for children, with most of the biggest gains coming in the lowest-income countries and in the developing world.

For a variety of reasons, rich countries are more easily able to cut per capita carbon emissions. These include both better access to cleaner energy sources and the fact it is more politically feasible to cut emissions in a rich country than in a poor country. In poor and middle-income countries, voters and residents tend to live closer to subsistence levels and the cost of cutting emissions could be the difference between a steady food supply and malnutrition. It could mean a real cut to the availability of reliable medical services.