According to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the US saving rate hit 3.1 percent in September. September’s rate was the lowest saving rate reported since December 2007, when the rate was 3.0 percent.
One of the leading ideological punching bags for well over one hundred years has been the ideas, institutions, and impact of “capitalism” on society. Think of something someone does not like in the world and the guilty party causing it is almost always the same – “capitalism.” But what is capitalism, and what is it not?
In the wake of Bitcoin hitting multiple all time highs there is no shortage of media coverage of Bitcoin. In this interview on Power Trading Radio we took a different tack and discussed the most important reasons to celebrate Bitcoin.
Sometimes it is possible to read or view something that completely changes the way one looks at things. I had that experience last week when I read an article at Lobelog entitled “A Plea for Common Sense on Missile Defense,” written by Joe Cirincione, a former staffer on the House Armed Services Committee who now heads the Ploughshares Fund, which is a Washington DC based global foundation that seeks to stop the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
4. The Third Party System: Pietists vs. Liturgicals
How could America experience a great leap into statism after 1900, a leap that went virtually unchallenged? What happened to the long-standing American tradition of individual liberty and laissez-faire? How could it so meekly roll over and play dead after having been dominant, or at least vibrant, during the last half of the 19th century, and for over half a century before that?
The Catalan regional parliament today declared independence (on a vote of 70-10) from Spain, following threats by the central government in Madrid to abolish the region’s political autonomy.
At this point, it appears the Madrid government will employ physical violence to impose direct rule from Madrid on the region.
For more on this here at mises.org, see:
3. Attempts at Monopoly in American Industry
In the decades after the Civil War and until the end of the 19th century, America experienced its veritable Industrial Revolution. In an explosion of industrialization, the United States transformed from a predominantly agricultural into an industrial country. In the process, output and living standards soared for a rapidly increasing population. The enormous expansion of production took place through the factory system which, in these decades, replaced the small artisan and craftsman as the predominant form of industrial production.
As a follow-up to Peter Klein’s post, I want to suggest that Rothbard and Friedman’s relationship may have definitively fractured at the famous Austrian economics conference in South Royalton Vermont in June 1974.
The devaluationary spiral of the peso began with the fall in oil prices in mid-2014. At the time, the depreciation was easy to explain in terms of the deterioration of the balance of trade. With Mexico being a net oil-exporting country, the fall of oil prices meant a fall in the country’s foreign currency revenue. This situation explains the depreciation of the peso of mid-2014 and all of 2015.
“Pension fund problems worsen in 43 states” says the Bloomberg headline. Laurie Meisler writes,
New Jersey, Kentucky and Illinois continue to lose ground and now have only about one third of the money they need to pay retirement benefits. And three states had double-digit declines in their pension funding ratios in the past year: Colorado, Oregon and Minnesota—though some of this can be attributed to actuarial changes in the way pension liabilities are calculated.
