There is much hand-wringing in the financial media this week after Treasury Secretary (and Lego Batman producer) Steve Mnuchin helped push the G-20 to remove its long standing language to “reject protectionism” from its annual statement.
This Thursday, the House of Representatives will vote on a Republican bill that supposedly repeals Obamacare. However, the bill retains Obamacare’s most destructive features.
The Trump rally has stocks at all-time highs. The VIX (which reflects the volatility of the S&P 500) is at 10-year lows. The headline unemployment rate is 4.8%. Everything must be A-OK in the US of A.
[Reprinted from the Lara-Murphy Report, February 2017.]
LARA-MURPHY REPORT: How did you become interested in Austrian economics?
JEFF DEIST: Fortunately Austrian economics became interested in me, through two happy developments.
Last week was a tale of two cities.
Rhetoric has recently trumped reality. It has become a misconceived bit of common “knowledge” that the United States of America is a bastion of free trade. Little could be further from the truth. The “freest” nation on earth, as we are taught to believe, imposes a staggering number of tariffs, import and export bans, sanctions and embargoes. Yet somehow “free trade” is blamed for the financial ills of the unemployed in the formerly industrial Midwest.
It’s been a busy week in Washington. The Fed raised interest rates another quarter of a point, selling the narrative that the economy is strong — in spite of its own indicators. Meanwhile, some are asking whether Snapchat’s stock rise and fall are a sign that the Fed-fueled stock bubble is ready to pop.
