Is the Bank of Canada going to raise its overnight benchmark rate?

Since rising interest rates are decreed by the central bank, the real scarcity of capital in which major financial institutions can borrow and lend out overnight amongst themselves is unknown. Disconnected from any real savings, we expect the Bank of Canada to manually raise rates when the going gets good.

This is flawed thinking. Clearly, the rag-tag team at the BoC has confused cause and effect once again.

The very sluggish recovery of the economy since the financial crisis — despite zero and near zero interest rates — presents the dominant school of New Keynesian macroeconomists with a conundrum. Many have attempted to resolve the riddle by arguing that such unprecedentedly low interest rates are not the doing of the Fed and therefore do not indicate an expansionary monetary policy. Although not formally a New Keynesian, George Selgin has taken up and vigorously defended this position.

You do not need to be a financial market wizard to see that especially bond markets have reached bubble territory: bond prices have become artificially inflated by central banks’ unprecedented monetary policies. For instance, the price-earnings-ratio for the US 10-year Treasury yield stands around 44, while the equivalent for the euro zone trades at 85. In other words, the investor has to wait 44 years (and 85 years, respectively) to recover the bonds’ purchasing price through coupon payments.

The results of the UK elections are unquestionably negative for the economy, bad for investment, bad for the pound, and for a swift Brexit resolution.

The UK economy has performed exceptionally well in the past years, even after the Brexit referendum. So well, that international agencies such as the IMF or the OECD had to completely reverse their negative expectations for the economy of a “Yes” vote.

The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications is a nonprofit accrediting agency for journalism programs. Bradley Hamm, the dean at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, has called the council’s accreditation-review process “flawed,” “superficial,” “extremely time-consuming,” and “sort of a low bar.”

So he’s gotten out. Northwestern University has effectively terminated its relationship with the council, calmly embracing its new status as unaccredited.

The attacks on physical cash from a phalanx of economists, central bankers, commercial banks, and politicians have not diminished in recent years. On the contrary, in the face of the worldwide increase in terror attacks, particularly in Europe, and ongoing pressure on public budgets, the cash ban issue is increasingly dragged into the spotlight.

At the end of World War II, U.S. officials told the American people that despite the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, America could not rest. That was because, they said, the United States now faced a new official enemy, one, they said, was arguably a bigger threat to Americans than Nazi Germany was. That new official enemy was the communist Soviet Union, which, ironically, had been America’s World War II partner and ally.