“Sophistry?” my indignant neighbor replied, shovel raised.

“Yes,” I responded, raising my shovel in response, “pure sophistry.”

How did we, two friendly neighbors, end up in such a confrontation? What was the reason for raising shovels instead of slinging snow? To answer that, we must go back in time.

The weather forecasters had predicted rain, followed by ice, and then by snow. Panic was everywhere, which usually means nothing would be the result — and I had hoped as much. Sure, we might get a little rain and a little ice and snow, but only as minor inconveniences.

Most early business cycle indicators suggest that the global economy is pretty much roaring ahead. Production and employment are rising. Firms keep investing and show decent profits. International trade is expanding. Credit is easy to obtain. Stock prices keep moving up to ever higher levels. All seems to be well. Or does it? Unfortunately, the economic upswing shows the devil’s footprints: central banks have set it in motion with their extremely low, and in some countries even negative, interest rate policy and rampant monetary expansion.

As Donald Trump might put it, major weapons contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin cashed in “bigly” in his first year in office.

A couple weeks ago, Tho Bishop reminded us of Bob Murphy’s explanation of the relationship between Bitcoin and the Regression Theorem. In the original post by Dr. Murphy, he addresses a common objection to Bitcoin made by Austrian economists:

I’ve just finished up a week of lectures and meetings in India. It was an interesting trip, but not an encouraging trip.

My first observation is that Indians are enormously successful when they emigrate to the United States. And they also do very well when they migrate to Singapore, South Africa, and other place around the world.

Jane Gleeson-White’s bestselling Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance is firmly entrenched as the leading primer to accounting history. This extremely popular and well-written book begins by arguing that accounting was the world’s first communications technology. The first accounting system dates from 7000 BC and the first complex accounting systems date from 3500 BC.

The World Wide Web was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in December of 1990. It went live on (now Sir) Tim Berners-Lee’s desktop and promised to provide his organization, CERN, with a non-hierarchical information sharing system.