In his new book Who Needs the Fed?, John Tamny makes a convincing case that the Federal Reserve is wholly unnecessary. Chapter after chapter, he offers examples of individuals engaging in credit transactions and explains how any government manipulation of these transactions is counterproductive or, at best, unnecessary.
During Friday’s bloodbath I heard a CNBC anchor lady assuring her (scant) remaining audience that Brexit wasn’t a big sweat. That’s because it is purportedly a political crisis, not a financial one.
Presumably in the rarified canyons of Wall Street, politics doesn’t matter much. After all, when things get desperate enough, Washington caves and does “whatever it takes” to get the stock averages moving upward again.
Here’s a news flash. That’s all about to change.
Following the success of the vote for Britain to withdraw from the European Union, many Americans renewed talk of the possibility of American states seceding from the United States.
Last Thursday, the people of Britain voted in a referendum to leave the European Union (EU). Most commentators view Britain’s exit (“Brexit”) from the European Union as bad news for economic growth in the UK and the eurozone. As a result, it is argued, the growth rate in the rest of the world will be also badly affected.
It is more likely that, whether the pace of real economic growth over time will weaken or strengthen is going to be set by the pace of expansion in the pool of real wealth.
Yesterday, we looked at how the European Union functions on a model of “democracy” that is based on very large constituency sizes, thus reducing access to policymakers, and reducing the ability of ordinary taxpayers to influence the lawmaking process. (The more residents there are for each elected official, the larger the constituency size.)
On Tuesday, during a somewhat raucous session of the European parliament, Nigel Farage gave his post-Brexit “victory speech”. Besides his trademark taunting of his pro-EU colleagues, Mr Farage made an important point, suggesting:
[Editor’s Note: This essay is forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to the Makers of Modern Entrepreneurship (Routledge, 2017), edited by David B. Audretsch and Erik E. Lehmann.]
Few books have as misleading a title as Hard Choices. For Hillary Clinton, as this tedious memoir of her years as Secretary of State makes evident, there are no hard choices. The Solutions to all political and economic problems are easy. We must always rely on the directing hand of government, guided by the superior wisdom of our moral and intellectual betters, Hillary Clinton foremost among them.
