In September 2008, the worsening global financial crisis hit a new phase when Lehman Brothers collapsed and it became undeniable that “hard times” had arrived for most ordinary people. By then, the unemployment rate had been climbing for months, foreclosures had skyrocketed, and the yield curve had been inverted through much of 2006 and 2007. Months later, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) declared that what we now call “the Great Recession” had begun in December 2007.

Jeff Deist: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome once again to The Human Action Podcast. We’ve got an excellent guest; he’s a friend of mine and also a friend of the Mises Institute, Stephan Livera. Many of you know him from the bitcoin world, from his eminently successful podcast, The Stephan Livera Podcast, but also, he’s a managing director at Swan Bitcoin International. And our topic this week is political freedom, economic freedom, and personal freedom and how these three things juxtapose.

John Mearsheimer recently gave an important lecture on the Ukrainian war. He warns that “the United States is now effectively at war with Russia.” Mearsheimer argues, “The United States is principally responsible.” Alexander Stubb contends in a reply to Mearsheimer, “The only place to blame is the Kremlin, Putin, and Russia.”

There’s a saying on Wall Street referring to the stock market that “all correlations go to one in a crisis.” Perhaps more accurately, all correlations go to one when a single governing body determines interest rates for the entire economy.

Interest rates are the price of money. Virtually all public companies utilize debt to some degree. When the cost of this debt increases, the stock price of each company must decrease.

Despite the blooming of literature on preindustrial African technology, the centrality of invention in precolonial Africa remains an obscure topic. Updated research has shown that precolonial Africa was a wellspring of creativity rather than a den of stagnation. Africans employed unique methods in response to environmental changes and were also experts in iron production.

Proto-Progressives didn’t stand back and let a porous border emancipate slaves into rising prosperity. Instead, proto-Progressives used the new industrialization, railroads, and telegraphs to power industrial-scale conscription, killing, maiming, and destruction.