The Virginia Tech Professor who blew the whistle on lead in the water in Flint, MI thinks “public science” has been broken. Not knowing its been a broken system all along. In a recent interview, he comes forth with a stinging indictment of government-supported science. He does understand that this widespread problem of incompetent, worthless and dangerous research is a funding problem.
Recorded at the Mises Circle in Houston, Texas, on 30 January 2016.
Will the libertarian message get swept under the rug over the next year, as the candidates unleash an orgy of statist rhetoric? Or are hopeful cracks beginning to show, as the two parties, mainstream media, academia, and PC enforcers increasingly lose credibility with the public?
Last year was a tough one for investors. Gold was down 10 percent. The Dow Industrials fell 2.5 percent, and most bond indexes finished down by at least that much.
One institution that performed remarkably well in 2015 was the Federal Reserve. It just finished its most profitable year on record. The $100 billion in net income earned last year was a slight improvement over the previous year. That total was also roughly three times higher than the Fed’s income from 2007, the last year before it initiated its Quantitative Easing programs in the wake of the financial crisis.
The insidious nature of the war on cash derives not just from the hurdles governments place in the way of those who use cash, but also from the aura of suspicion that has begun to pervade private cash transactions. In a normal market economy, businesses would welcome taking cash. After all, what business would willingly turn down customers?
Judicious rationalists do not pretend that human reason can ever make man omniscient. They are fully aware of the fact that, however knowledge may increase, there will always remain things ultimately given and not liable to any further elucidation. But, they say, as far as man is able to attain cognition, he must rely upon reason. The ultimate given is the irrational. The knowable is, as far as it is known already, necessarily rational.
In 2016, the Fed’s annual stress test on banks will include a scenario in which the interest rate on the three-month U.S. Treasury bill becomes negative in the second quarter of 2016 and then declines to -0.5%, remaining at that level until the first quarter of 2019.
Joe Salerno’s article, “A Reformulation of Austrian Business Cycle Theory in Light of the Financial Crisis,” is now available in a Polish translation. The article demonstrates that the phenomenon of overconsumption that occurred during the housing bubble is completely consistent with the theory and rebuts Paul Krugman and several other Keynesian
In recent years, there has been a growing awareness fact that the United States imprisons a far larger percentage of its population than many other nations. Much of this is due to the fact that what we call crime in the US is often not an imprisonable offense in the EU nations.
The years during and after the financial crisis saw a consensus of monetary easing among central bankers around the world. The Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of Japan all engaged in loosening their monetary policy, creating trillions of dollars worth of new money in an attempt to boost their economies. None of them wanted to be the only one not easing monetary policy, and none of them wanted to the first to return to “tighter” monetary policy. But are we beginning to see this easing consensus breaking down?
