Tonight Joseph Salerno will join The Sabrin Center for Free Enterprise at Ramapo College of New Jersey for a panel looking back at the 2008 financial crisis. The event is focused on the questions “Why it happened, how it happened, could it happen again?” It will begin at 7 pm ET and will be streamed live.
Other speakers will include:
The Left has become increasingly and often bizarrely obsessed with all manners of supposed privilege these days. Buzzfeed even put out a quiz on how much privilege you have. All of these various privileges work to form a simple Marxist-like dichotomy between the oppressed and the oppressor. So for whites, men, heterosexuals, Christians, cisgendered, able-bodied and attractive people are all at least privileged if not part of an oppressor class.
It seems like the media will never stop promoting the myth that public school teachers are “underpaid.” The most recent example is the front-page story in Time, “This Is What It’s Like to Be a Teacher in America.”
In a free society, income and wealth gaps are driven by variations in skill, knowledge, talents, independence, creativity, drive, and willingness to take risks. People who are satisfied with safe and secure occupations — like economics professor, school teacher, nurse, dentist or tax return preparer — expect to have much less wealth and income than risk-taking individuals who successfully capitalize on splendid ideas that result in products and services that benefit all of society.
A recent article in American Affairs by Cass Sunstein illustrates a cast of mind that poses a great danger. Sunstein is a legal academic, well-known for his work in behavioral economics. In his book Nudge, written with Richard Thaler, he informed us of the benefits of having experts like him “nudge” us into making choices that they regard as good for us. In “An Anatomy of Radicalism,” he shows in a clear way the blind spots of his way of thinking.
On August 31, President Donald J. Trump signed the Executive Order on Strengthening Retirement Security in America, a preliminary step in allowing seniors more economic freedom and security in retirement.
As part of the executive order, Trump discussed how rules regarding 401(k) distributions prevent Americans from saving as much money as they otherwise would.
Suppose you live and work in Indianapolis. Your employer informs you that it wants to transfer you to San Francisco. One of your first concerns is likely to be: “Hey, what about my salary? The cost of living is really high out there, isn’t it?” Anticipating such a reaction, your boss assures you that your salary will be bumped up based on the difference in your cost of living for the two cities. Should this allay your concern?
US interest rates keep creeping upwards, largely because the US Federal Reserve (Fed) is expected to ramp up borrowings costs further in the coming quarters. The Federal Funds Rate is now in a bandwidth of 1.75 to 2.0 per cent, and the yield on 10-year Treasuries has recently climbed slightly above the 3 per cent level. Higher, let alone further rising, borrowing costs can be expected to have far-reaching consequences for the economy and financial markets in particular.
In the New York Times September 14, 2018, in an article “We’re Measuring The Economy All Wrong,” the writer of the article David Leonhardt complains that despite strong gross domestic product (GDP) data most people don’t feel it. The writer of the article argues that,
The trouble is that a handful of statistics dominate the public conversation about the economy despite the fact that they provide a misleading portrait of people’s lives. Even worse, the statistics have become more misleading over time.
No economic crisis and consequent recession hit when the lengthening of the stages in the productive structure, a process we studied in the last chapter, results from a prior increase in voluntary saving, rather than from credit expansion banks bring about without the backing of any growth in real saving. Indeed if a sustained rise in voluntary saving triggers the process, this saving prevents all of the six microeconomic phenomena which spontaneously arise in reaction to credit expansion and which reverse the artificial boom that credit expansion initially creates.
