Diane Swonk says the 20,000 payroll number for February was a head fake. She blamed bad weather, the government shutdown, and other gobbledygook to explain away the 160,000 job miss for the year’s shortest month.
According to Michael Snyder, in a piece posted on Zerohedge.com,
By the end of March, Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet at a formal signing ceremony to ratify a historic trade agreement between the world’s two largest economies . It has been one long year since the United States fired the first salvos in the trade war, leading to months of tit-for-tat tariffs, endless deliberations, and investors riding their hopes up and down with every little report, comment, and analysis.
People value present goods more highly than future goods. For instance, an apple available today is considered more valuable than the same apple available in, say, one month. This is expressive of time preference — which is an undeniable fact, a category of human action.
The sentence “Humans act” is a logically irrefutable truth. It cannot be denied without causing a logical contradiction. By saying “Humans can not act”, you act and thus contradict your very statement.
In most countries, numerous government welfare programs provide benefits (often means-tested) to eligible recipients. Whether these payments arise from unemployment compensation, child tax credits, old age pensions, or a myriad of other programs, the outcome is the same: recipients receive guaranteed payments. The ultimate goal of many poverty warriors is a Universal Basic Income (UBI), often promoted as a supposedly cheaper alternative to the numerous welfare programs it is intended to replace.
With the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests raging for more than three months, the European Union’s viability as a political entity has come into question.
Indeed, the EU has gone through a whirlwind of economic and political upheavals since the eurozone crisis of 2009. In 2016, the EU experienced a political earthquake when the Brexit referendum occurred, and British voters decided that it was time for the UK to leave the EU.
On October 17, 2018, recreational marijuana was legalized in Canada, ending 95 years of prohibition. For those who believe, as I do, that individuals should have the freedom to determine their own consumption, this is good news. However, I am not congratulating Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party for making good on a campaign promise made three years earlier. Instead, I point out the inconsistency of not applying their rationale for pot legalization to the legalization of all drugs.
According to the Modern Money Theory (MMT), money is a thing that the State decides upon. Following the ideas of the German economist Georg Knapp, the MMT simply regards money as a token. For instance, when an individual places a coat in the cloakroom of a theatre, he receives a tin disc or a paper receipt. This receipt or a disc is a proof that the individual is entitled to demand the return of his coat. The token was labeled by Knapp as chartal or a pay token.
As the economic contagion of the global financial crisis was spreading from country to country in 2007, it was frequently noted that the mainstream economics profession seemed to be just as much in the dark about the true causes of the crisis as were the general public. In place of anything incisive and theoretically grounded, most people were forced to make do with vague hand-waving and metaphors to explain the crash, with one particularly well-worn bromide sticking out in my own memory as almost the defining phrase of the crisis: “When America sneezes, the whole world gets sick.”
Life after death for asset inflation: this is what happens when “speculative fever” remains high even after monetary inflation has paused. This may well have been the situation in global markets during 2019 so far. But history and principle suggest that life after death in this monetary sense is short.
On January 30, Rep. John Larson and 200 Democratic co-sponsors introduced the Social Security 2100 Act. Portrayed as giving retirees long-overdue benefit increases, it would actually add another step to Social Security’s long-running Ponzi scheme.
Despite Democrats’ history of rejecting that term for Social Security, it has been the biggest series of Ponzi schemes in history, redistributing tens of trillions of dollars of wealth to earlier recipients from subsequent generations.
