Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. By Anthony Flood. Independently published, 2019. I +93 pages.

Last week the New York Times published some of President Trump’s 1980s and 1990s tax returns information. The information detailed President Trump’s financial difficulties during that time. While you would not know it from reading some media reports, this is old news. In fact, President Trump openly discussed his financial difficulties on his popular reality television show.

[Editor’s Note: In this selection from “Is the Virus of International Macroeconomic Interventionism Infectious? An ABCT Analysis“ in the newest issue of Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, the authors analyze how a commodity-money-based economy would be effected by neighboring economies still using fiat money.

Since the latest the crisis in 2008/2009, central banks around the world have been doing their best to expel risks from financial markets. By lowering interest rates, fixing them at extremely low levels, or issuing more credit and money, monetary policymakers make sure that ailing borrowers are kept afloat. In fact, central banks have put a “safety net” under the economies and the financial markets in particular. As it seems, this measure has been working quite effectively over the last ten years or so.

Our current super-long economic cycle is a monetary curse. Under sound money it would not exist, and under the pre-1914 gold standard, it never occurred. The present business cycle expansion in the US — the longest ever — comes in the wake of three recent super-cycle expansions: 1991-2000, 1982-90, and 1961-69. Arguably, the first super-long cycle was in the early years of the Federal Reserve, from 1921-9.

Since I don’t exactly live in the world’s most crime-free neighborhood, I recently had to replace my house’s 30-year old steel doors. They weren’t cheap, but as I spoke with the salesman, he noted I had lucked out because their prices would be going up significantly in the near future due to new steel tariffs.

The company was unsure how just much this would impact sales and staff, but higher prices would naturally have a negative impact on revenue and hiring.

Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled sweeping new legislation on Thursday that would impose a federal cap of 15% on credit-card interest rates.

The bill would also allow state governments to set interest-rate ceilings even lower than the federal mandate.

Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian school of economics, expressed a fundamental insight in his essay On The Origins of Money: goods compete on the market to become a monetary medium of exchange. The most saleable goods are the likeliest to become used as a medium of exchange and eventually emerge as the money.

Last week, the the Federal Reserve left unchanged its benchmark federal funds rate, with Fed Chairman Jerome Powell declaring the US economy to be “on a good path.”

In a unanimous vote, the Fed kept the rate in a range of 2.25% to 2.5%.