Unable to attend AERC 2018 in person? Thanks to our generous sponsors, you can watch live broadcasts of the named lectures at Mises.org/live. All times are CDT.
9:15 - 10:15 a.m. The F.A. Hayek Memorial Lecture (Sponsored by Greg and Joy Morin): Roger Garrison, “The Road to Hayek”
In last year’s French presidential election between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, I joked that voters should choose the socialist over the socialist, but made a serious point that Macron – despite having been part of Hollande’s disastrous government – was preferable since there was at least a hope of market-oriented ref
“This is just a truly astonishing moment coming from the White House podium,” tweeted MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt. Like the rest of the media pack-animals she hunts with, Ms. Hunt had been fuming over President Trump’s telephone call to Vladimir Putin, congratulating him on winning another term as president.
Reliably opposed to a truce were party heavies on both sides. Sen. John McCain joined the chorus: “An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections,” he intoned.
Today offers the latest reminder that the question of US default is not a matter of “if”, but “how.”
In 2013, in response to the increasing “open carry” debate, Howard Schultz, the chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Starbucks posted an open letter on the company’s website requesting that “customers no longer bring firearms into our stores or outdoor seating areas.” Until this time, various gun-control groups proposed boycotting Starbucks because of the company’s gun policy of following local laws that permitted open carry.
The timing of America’s announcement on new tariffs is circumstantially connected with China. In an announcement of enormous importance, a date has finally been set for trading in oil futures denominated in yuan. China’s suppliers of roughly 8.5 million barrels of oil per day are agreeing to take yuan for their oil, not dollars, and the new futures contract allows them to hedge the yuan into dollars, euros, yen, or even gold.
[The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, and the Freemasons to Facebook by Niall Ferguson, Penguin Press, 2018.]
The always provocative Justin Raimondo, longtime editor of Antiwar.com, has a new column in Chronicles Magazine that asks a very simple question: Whatever happened to the libertarian movement?
JEFF DEIST: How does a kid from New Jersey get interested in economics, much less decide to get a PhD?
JOE SALERNO: Well, I didn’t really plan it. I think it all began back in fifth grade when my mother’s cousin visited from Italy, and during the course of conversation, he revealed that he was a member of the Italian Communist Party. My father, a New Deal Democrat who had voted for JFK, was also an ardent anti-communist. He got into a big argument with the cousin and then threatened to throw him out.
The Federal Reserve continues to slowly increase the federal funds rate from 1.5 to 1.75 percent today, the first such decision of the Jerome Powell era. More interesting is that, when asked during his press conference, Chairman Powell dismissed the idea of the Fed’s Interest on Excess Reserves (IOER) policy as a subsidy to Wall Street.
