Turkey has been almost constantly in the news over the past year, as troubling headlines about its economy and political situation continue to pile up. In a currency meltdown that escalated last summer, the Turkish lira has plunged by nearly 40%, threatening the Turkish economy as a whole. In January, inflation topped 20%, with skyrocketing food prices having an especially severe impact on the population. At the same time, unemployment hit 14.7%, its highest level in a decade, and a figure that’s only expected to rise further, as the Turkish economy is projected to contract by 2% in 2019.

Behind the Huawei story, we must not forget there is a wider financial war being waged by America against China and Russia. Stories about China’s banks being short of dollars are incorrect: the shortage is of inward capital flows to support the US Government’s budget deficit. By attracting those global portfolio flows instead, China’s Belt and Road Initiative threatens US Government finances, so the financial war and associated disinformation can be expected to escalate.

Public high schools still aren’t taking school security seriously. Last month, hundreds of thousands of students in the Denver area stayed home from school when a woman in Florida suggested online that she was “obsessed” with the Columbine shootings.

In its latest budget request, the Trump administration is asking for a near-record $750 billion for the Pentagon and related defense activities, an astonishing figure by any measure.

In the last decade or so, a handful of Austrian economists have been aggressively promoting a strange story of the postwar development of the Misesian tradition.  In their telling, Friedrich Hayek and Israel Kirzner were busily developing Mises’s approach to economic theory and method when Murray Rothbard showed up and shunted the methodological train onto the wrong track.  For this reason, Rothbard and his followers—who these storytellers collectively and derisively refer to as “the Rothbardians”—are to be read out of the Austrian movement.  In an 

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Is President Trump about to invade Venezuela? His advisors keep telling us in ever-stronger terms that “all options are on the table” and that US military intervention to restore Venezuela’s constitution “may be necessary.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on the Sunday news programs to claim that President Trump could launch a military attack against Venezuela without Congress’s approval.

Economics In Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly. By John Quiggin. Princeton University Press, 2019. Xii + 390 pages.

What characterizes the modern economy is its complex structure of production that seemingly generates an endless amount, and an endless variety, of goods. It seems that the production structure has, as it were, a self-generating mechanism. Careful examination, however, shows that without a key ingredient, the entire infrastructure could not have emerged. The ingredient that makes it all possible is the subsistence fund. The following simplified example will allow us to ascertain the essence of this fund.