The headlines this week were dominated by last weekend’s events at Charlottesville. Of course, instead of rejecting the the sort of overly politicized society that makes such escalation inevitable, politicians of both sides tried to seize the moment. As such, we have the returning distraction over the battle over confederate monuments — an issue easily remedied by privatizing them.
The Republicans failed on health care, but now they are offering a new plan for tax and spending cuts, with a promise of smaller government.
Western governments have an overriding problem, and that is they have reached or exceeded the bounds of taxation, at a time when legally mandated welfare costs are accelerating. Treasury departments in all the welfare nations are acutely aware of this problem, to which there’s no apparent solution. The economic recovery, so consistently forecast since the great financial crisis, has hardly materialised and has added to the problem.
There is, if treasury economists could only understand it, a solution in free trade.
Dr. Per Bylund’s recently published article poignantly states one of the core problems in the Chinese economy and its the state-manipulated Keynesian foundation. I do agree with his opinion. And if we dig deeper into the exact situation of Chinese economy, we will find that it’s a typical failing of the Keynesian, cronyist system.
Conventional wisdom says that savings is the amount of money left after monetary income was used for consumer outlays. Hence, for a given consumer outlays an increase in money income implies more saving and thus more funding for investment. This in turn sets the platform for higher economic growth.
Various statistics that governments produce on a regular basis carry the label “seasonally adjusted”. What is the meaning of this label? According to popular thinking the data that is observed over time (labelled as time series) is determined by four factors, which are:
I could see no reason why I should, at the end of each week, pour the reward of my toil into the purse of my master. When I carried to him my weekly wages, he would, after counting the money, look me in the face with a robber-like fierceness, and ask, “Is this all?” He was satisfied with nothing less than the last cent. He would, however, when I made him six dollars, sometimes gives me six cents, to encourage me.
The forces of globalization during the past two decades have been stronger than at any time since the era of “the Great Deflation” which started in the aftermaths of the US Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, and continued through the 1880s. During the earlier period, the US economy enjoyed record growth in prosperity. But, during the present era of globalization, the US and most advanced economies have grown fitfully and overall slowly.
