As many who follow websites like mises.org already know, Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison for running a dark web drug marketplace known as Silk Road under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts. After receiving his sentence — a deliberately harsh ruling for a man barely in his thirties — Ulbricht’s defense team began to work on his appeal. On May 31, Ulbricht lost the appeal, meaning that his life sentence will stand.
Last month, the money supply growth rate in the United States fell to a 104-month low, rising by 5.91 percent. This is the lowest growth rate recorded since July 2008 when the growth rate was 5.24 percent.
Given the imprecise nature of these estimates, however, it is fair to say that the rate of growth is essentially unchanged since March, and for the past three months, money supply growth has been at eight-year lows.
[Editor’s Note: Bylud and McCaffrey have a new article in the Journal of Business Venturing. The executive summary is below and the full article is available online for a limited time.]
If Genevieve Valentine has given us an accurate account, Nancy MacLean has written an incredibly bad book on libertarianism.
US Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently penned an opinion article in the Washington Post. He wrote that the illegal drug business generates violence and violent crime. True enough.
He further noted that violent crime is down by half since the War on Drugs peaked in 1991. Again, this is true.
Beyond the behavior of speculators or OPEC—which some consider a cartel, if there is anything we can learn is that the fall in oil prices responds to the forces of supply and demand. On the demand side, lower economic activity throughout the world, specially in China, has lowered the price of oil. Projections by the International Energy Agency show how demand weakened in 2014, although it rebounded in 2016.
They’re back. Subprime mortgages. And loan brokers are needed to start making them. Kirsten Grind, who, by the way, wrote a wonderful book about Washington Mutual (WaMu) entitled The Lost Bank, writes for the Wall Street Journal, “Brokers willing to learn the lost art of making risky mortgages are in demand again.”
Nostalgia seems to be very popular in Washington. While the neocons and Democratic Party hard-liners have succeeded in bringing back the Cold War with Russia, it looks like President Trump is determined to take us back to a replay of the Bay of Pigs!
Mario Draghi has again missed an exceptional opportunity to adjust monetary policy. By ignoring the huge risks that are being created from the brutal inflation of financial assets, saying that “there are no signs of a bubble,” the European Central Bank (ECB) remains adamantly focused on creating inflation by decree, denying the effects of technology, demography, and overcapacity.
“No signs of bubble”? I’ll show you some of them myself.
