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.
NPR featured an unintentionally funny piece this morning on Donald Trump’s views toward the EU and free trade. The guest, former US ambassador to the EU Anthony Gardner, rightfully criticized the president’s view that “protection will lead to great prosperity and strength,” and called for continued global engagement by US companies and consumers. But he revealed, perhaps inadvertently, what political actors mean by “free trade.”
Mainstream media are worried about 2017 shocks. So they should be. If you had gambled a pound (or euro) this time last year on a triple accumulator; Leicester City to be English football champions, Brexit, and then Trump, you would have redeemed your betting slip for a million.
The US government’s efforts against illicit drugs have finally run their course. With over one trillion dollars wasted over the past several decades and nothing to show but failure, taxpayers are beginning to ask a simple yet pertinent question: Is it time to end the bottomless funding of this utterly ineffective anti-drug crusade?
The Spanish banking sector is getting used to judicial setbacks. Unfortunately, they’re not the sorts of setbacks we’d like to see. This could have been an article on the elimination of the legal privileges — e.g., the existence of a state-owned central bank in charge of bailing out its (equally) irresponsible fellows — that financial businesses are nowadays granted worldwide. Eliminating those privileges would have been a setback for the banking sector, but good for everyone else.
America has a new president, but will the new boss be the same as the old boss? Already we’ve seen the GOP embrace the same failed policies of the past in regard to healthcare and spending.
Today Donald Trump becomes the 45th president of the United States. American voters rejected the devil they know so well — Hillary Clinton — for the devil they don’t. Why they did so, and how Trump prevailed, is the biggest political story of our age. But the rejection of progressive hubris, what Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” of those who would presume to plan our lives, is at the heart of that story.
Would you like to know my secret to turning my environmentalist friends into stalwart defenders of the marketplace? The answer is simple: coal.
You would be amazed by the reversal in rhetoric witnessed right before your eyes, typically accompanied by a big dose of schadenfreude aimed at Appalachian people.
The ECB’s increasingly shrill mantra that it makes policy for the monetary union as a whole and not for its largest member (Germany) could well cause a black swan to appear — in the form of a German political shock this autumn.
