The Senate Banking Committee today is hosting the head of the SEC and CFTC to discuss cryptocurrency.

This past Tuesday afternoon, I was speaking with a reporter who was interested in the positive effects of infrastructure spending that occurred in the form of fiscal “stimulus” in my part of the country, back during the dark days of the Great Recession, around 2009 and 2010. How did this help our region, he wanted to know? 

“Democracy Dies in the Darkness” is the proud motto of the Washington Post. But, considering the past week’s frenzy, the new motto for much of the media and many Democrats is, “Disclosure is the Death of Democracy.” Unfortunately, the uproar around the release of the Nunes memo totally missed the deadly political peril posed by pervasive federal secrecy.

To follow up on Peter Klein’s post today, the dehomogenization debate of the last few decades was actually initiated by a radical reinterpretation of the socialist calculation debate of the 1930s published by Israel Kirzner in 1988.

George Orwell’s wonderful essay Politics and the English Language reads as true today as it must have in 1946, just a few years before smoking and tuberculosis would cut short his life.

It is generally held that by means of statistical and mathematical methods one can organize historical data into a useful body of information, which in turn can serve as the basis for the assessments of the state of the economy. It is also held that the knowledge secured from the assessment of the data is likely to be of a tentative nature since it is not possible to know the true nature of the facts of reality.

Once again, the financial fears have been ratcheted up due to recent announcements by the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that by the middle of March 2018 the Federal government will have run out of room to continue borrowing due to the official debt ceiling. Some are now calling for scrapping a legal debt ceiling altogether, and allow Uncle Sam to have an unlimited line of credit. This is a bad idea.