Among the many new directives and executive orders already issued by the Trump administration is a little-noticed order to halt a scheduled cut in mortgage insurance fees levied by the FHA. 

Earlier in January, the Obama administration announced it would cut the FHA’s insurance premium by a quarter of a percentage point to 0.60 percent, effective on Jan. 27.

Did you ever see a woman light a cigarette and thought to yourself “What a provocative example of moral decay!”? That’s likely not to be the case, but only because you weren’t born in the 19th century. The fact that your favorite Western movie doesn’t show women smoking tobacco is actually historically accurate: women weren’t supposed to be smoking until the 1920’s.

One of the biggest surprises during Donald Trump’s unconventional presidential campaign was his frequent criticism of the Federal Reserve. Though he was highly inconsistent on what he thought the Fed should do, coming out as both a critic and advocate of the current low interest rate policy, he was steadier in his dismissal of the Fed as an independent institution.

This week we commemorate Austrian-born economist Oskar Morgenstern’s birthday. Born on January 24, 1902, he died on July 26, 1977, at the age of 75. He is best known as the co-developer of modern game theory with John von Neumann in their 1944 book, “The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,”

This article was translated by Bernardo Ferrero, from the original Italian. 

Chinese Billionaire Jack Ma has some advice for the US government: If the US is so concerned about industry and jobs, it should try starting fewer wars and spending trillions of dollars on them. Ma spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, saying:

Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s recent speech at Stanford University certainly was much like Ms. Yellen herself: predictable and safe. She is less opaque than Alan Greenspan, and less combative that Ben Bernanke. But she shares both men’s ability to say very little that is interesting or controversial.

The growth of US military power has rarely, if ever, been the result of legitimate concerns about defensive strategy, let alone about the national welfare. Instead, it’s more often a consequence of a waste, corruption, and imperial ambition that together have produced the modern military-industrial complex.

The world has come a long way since the heady days before the Great Depression of the 1930s. Technology, for one thing, has meant vast changes to our way of life and indeed to significant improvements in our economic productivity. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that these technological advances now make us depression-proof.