The Adam Smith Institute have recently published my report “Killing the Cash Cow: Why Andy Haldane is Wrong on Demonetisation” on Andy Haldane’s proposal (“How low can you go?”) to abolish cash.

April 10 marked 2018’s “Equal Pay Day,” decrying the almost 20 percent difference between median yearly incomes for men and women working full time (35 hours or more per week) for the most recent reporting year (2016). As has become traditional, “celebrants” reiterated assertions that the data establishes unjustifiable discrimination against women “doing the same work as men.”

In his New York Times article of March 27, 2018 — ”Immaculate inflation strikes again” — Paul Krugman argues that those economists who are of the opinion that the key factor that causes inflation is increases in money supply are very wrong. According to Krugman, the key factor that sets in motion inflation is unemployment. While a decline in the unemployment rate is associated with a strengthening in the rate of inflation, an increase in the unemployment rate is associated with a decline in the rate of inflation.

The Kentucky state workers’ pension system is by some measures the worst funded pension in the entire country with an estimated $70 billion dollars of unfunded liabilities. A recent audit of the pension system found that the plan has had $6.9 billion in negative cash flows since 2005. At $40 billion, Kentucky teachers make up the largest portion of this unfunded liability. But even in the face of impending insolvency, many teachers in Kentucky are still protesting the slightest changes and cuts to their compensation that have been proposed in an effort to prevent catastrophe.

Lately, when he isn’t trying to blame China on America’s competitiveness woes, President Donald Trump has become obsessed with the online retailer Amazon.

The possible trade war between China and the United States has become one of the hottest topics in the recent international news, though officially the trade war has not started yet. Economic theories have already told us that free trade can benefit the individuals among different countries; and on the contrary, tariffs can make them worse off.

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”, quipped Mark Twain in response to a newspaper report that said he was on his deathbed. The same could be said about many fiat currencies. Whether we are looking at the US dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen or the British Pound: In the wake of the financial and economic crisis of 2008/2009, quite a few commentators painted a rather bleak future for them: high inflation, even hyperinflation, some even forecast their collapse. That did not happen. Instead, fiat money seems to be still in great demand.

What is it with economic illiteracy and writing in the media? One explanation is obvious: media need to sell newspapers (or get “clicks”), so it makes sense to exploit people’s confirmation bias. In other words, tell people what they want to hear. And, as we know, economics is that science that reveals that things aren’t the way they may first appear. In fact, the mechanisms behind the phenomena we observe are often the very opposite of what the untrained eye thinks that it sees.

When the southern states were debating secession in 1861, there was one other proposed secession that almost always gets overlooked in history: New York City. The Mayor of New York at the time, Fernando Wood, saw disunion as an inevitability at the start of 1861, and in a January 6th address to the city council, he advocated New York City’s secession.

Ex-Wharton student and WWE hall of famer, Donald J. Trump, is thinking $30 billion isn’t a large enough smackdown to those stealers of intellectual property (as if that’s a legitimate thing), the Chinese. Trump urged US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to aim bigly, warning those during the tariff powwow that they should prepare for an announcement during the coming weeks.