Coinbase, the cryptocurrency trading platform, has been ordered by a federal court to turn over information sought by the IRS relating to more than 14,000 of the site’s users. As TechCrunch puts it, the IRS noticed “the number of tax returns claiming gains from virtual currency didn’t line up with the emerging popularity of digital currencies like bitcoin as an investment vehicle.”
The epic sale in mid-November of the painting Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci at the auction price of more than $450 million to a Middle Eastern buyer contained within its occasion three key lessons about the difference between market value and the market for Value — a distinction that perhaps best defines the long-term difference between wealth and money.
Yesterday Donald Trump nominated Marvin Goodfriend to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, one of the numerous vacancies that have emerged over the course of the past year. While his prior nominations of Jay Powell as Chairman and Randal Quarles as Vice Chair represented a disappointing commitment to the status quo, his selection of Goodfriend is a dangerous act of outright betrayal to Trump’s core constituency of working class voters.
Roy Cordato recently wrote a very good article for the Carolina Journal on the deduction of state and local taxes:
Should you ever be taxed on “income” that is not, in any meaningful sense, yours?
President Donald Trump has nominated Carnegie Mellon University professor Marvin Goodfriend to be a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
We reported back in June that Goodfriend was likely to be nominated. As a governor, Goodfriend leaves much to desired.
He has criticized the use of QE, but, as Bloomberg notes,
Recently, the people of two of Italy’s most prosperous regions voted in a referendum, on whether they wished to have greater autonomy from Rome. The referendum is non-binding, but that’s not what’s most significant in the results.
What is significant is that over 95% of those who voted in Lombardy, did so in favour of greater autonomy. In Veneto, the number in favour of greater autonomy was even higher, at 98%.
The writer known as Bionic Mosquito has helpfully brought to our attention some of the good stuff offered by Murray Rothbard in his articles for Libertarian Forum. Specifically, Mosquito points to Rothbard’s 1969 article promoting the mayoral candidacy of Norman Mailer. Rothbard writes:
Uniformity of treatment has been upheld as an ideal by almost all writers. This ideal is supposed to be implicit in the concept of “equality before the law,” which is best expressed in the phrase, “Like to be treated alike.” To most economists this ideal has seemed self-evident, and the only problems considered have been the practical ones of defining exactly when one person is “like” someone else (problems that, we shall see below, are insuperable).
