The supply of US dollars accelerated during late 2016 with October’s year-over-year percentage increase in the money supply hitting a 46-month high of 11.2 percent. The YOY growth rate fell slightly to 10.3 percent in November.

This comes after a long period of relatively sedate growth in the money supply through most of 2013, 2014 and 2015. 

The recent surge in money supply growth suggests that the likelihood of an economic contraction in the near future has been reduced, with the next downturn being pushed out further into the future. 

Adapted from the Summer 2016 issue of The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

What does 2017 have in store? Our attention will be directed toward the Fed and other central banks, as the world’s financial elites try to navigate through increasingly volatile waters. Central bankers don’t have a strong track record for seeing bubbles, but it’s hard for them to ignore growing skepticism from both the public and even their own governments.

In the fall semester of 1980 I discovered the word libertarian. One of my dorm mates knocked on my door and told me to come see what was on his television. It was a Ed Clark for president advertisement in which Clark said that he was the Libertarian candidate for president and gave a description of what that meant.

One of the most debated issues right now is Obamacare, and specifically whether and how the new republican-dominated Washington DC apparatus will repeal it — and when. Democrats are expectedly up in arms and fear any change to the policy, the suggested legacy of President Obama. Republicans are considering their options: whether to repeal parts of it or the whole thing, how to best do it, if it should be replaced by something else (perhaps Romneycare?), and how to deal with a repeal’s “millions of people losing insurance” (to paraphrase Paul Krugman).

In 1862, José Arechabala y Aldama arrived in Havana, Cuba at the age of fifteen. At thirty-one, he founded Arechabala Industries, a small distillery in Cárdenas, Cuba, which was then a small but rapidly growing seaport city with a bustling port and budding railroad industry.

This week, twenty states began implementing minimum wage increases that were passed during 2016. As the country waits to see how these increased wages this will affect the economy, the U.S. territories have already provided us with a grim example.