As I noted in my reaction to reports of Jerome Powell’s nomination, Trump’s endorsement was a significant defeat for the growing movement among Hill Republicans to force the Fed to adopt “rules-based monetary policy.” Since I’ve already written on why I think such reform plans would largely fail to achieve their desired ends, I’m not particularly bothered by the defeat — but I do think there is a lesson to be gained here on libertarian strategy.

The Bank of England raised its target key rate yesterday, increasing the rate from 0.25 percent to 0.5 percent. The last time the Bank raised rates was in July of 2007 when the key rate increased from 5.5 percent to 5.75 percent. 

There long has been a persistent academic debate as to whether an “ancient economy,” referring mainly to Greece, even existed at all. In a field dominated by Marx, Marxists, the 19th century sociologist Max Weber, and such scholars of renown as Sir Moses Finley, the lingering image of the economic world of the Greek polis is that of something very static. We imagine a leisure class lounging at the sandaled foot of an orator while slaves tended to the fields, flogging cows harnessed to ploughs stuck in the mud.

“The inventory coming, but people are buying faster than it can get here,” GLVR President David Tina told Channel 8. “We have 5,000 available houses, but we sell 3,000 a month.” The Business Press backs this up, “By the end of September, GLVAR reported 4,969 single-family homes listed for sale without any sort of offer. That’s down 33.1 percent from one year ago.

The ECB faces the Devil’s Alternative that Frederick Forsyth mentioned in one of his books. All options are potentially riskly. Mario Draghi knows that maintaining the so-called stimuli involves more risks than benefits, but also knows that eliminating them could make the eurozone deck of cards collapse.

The appointment of Jerome Powell as the new chair of the Federal Reserve must be interpreted by the markets as a sign of continuity. He is not the hawk that many market participants feared and neither holds a dovish and dangerous stance.

Hunter Lewis‘s op-ed at Foxnews today explains how Trump’s new nominee for the Fed Chairmanship, Jerome Powell, is anything but a departure fron business as usual. Lewis begins by comparing Powell’s appointment to that of Ben Bernanke:

There are many differences between Austrian economics and the neoclassical mainstream, but one of the most critical involves the difficult field of “capital & interest theory.” (Here are three links of increasing difficulty to show the Austrian perspective on these issues: one, two, and

The Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances, according to Federal Reserve Governor Brainard, shows that the share of income held by the top 1 percent of households has risen from 17 percent in 1988 to 24 percent in 2015, and that the wealth held by that same group rose from 30 percent in 1989 to 39 percent in 2016.