Norway’s largest bank, DNB, has joined the relentless campaign by governments and big banks the world over to abolish cash, the physical embodiment of a nation’s monetary unit and the last tangible, if tenuous, link to the 19th-century gold standard. Almost all of today’s national currency notes, notably excluding the euro, originated as claims to a definite weight of gold (or silver).
There are a handful of themes out there on recent market action that are either totally wrong or otherwise highly misleading. For instance, regarding the recent calamity in the capital markets, one especially apparent dichotomy has presented itself as offering two choices as to what, exactly, is causing the painful turbulence.
When Sweden abandoned its open border with the rest of the Schengen Area, and started checking passports, that created a bottleneck in Denmark. Migrants and refugees were traveling through Denmark in large numbers, but when Sweden closed its border, many of those migrants stopped and stayed in Denmark.
Fear is in the air. Central bankers are warning of crisis, stock markets are falling, and even the media is realizing that the economy may not be as stable as our central planners would have us believe.
This is from the in-case-you-missed-it files. Thomas Sowell, my favorite Chicago economist, was a long-time supporter of the Federal Reserve bound by a Friedmanite monetary rule. In an interview in 2010, he called the Fed a “cancer” and advocated its abolition. It is no exaggeration to suggest that Sowell’s conversion to the anti-Fed view, and that of a number of economists since, reflects Murray Rothbard’s ongoing influence by way of Ron Paul.
