For Spain, 1492 was a transcendent year. The discovery of the New World and the vast hordes of gold and new riches was a springboard vaulting Spain from a barely-known kingdom in medieval Europe, to the most influential global power of the day.
Supply siders are always so cocksure of themselves that it is fun to gloat a little—alright, a lot—when their forecasts go awry, which they frequently do. Remember back in 2006 when Arthur Laffer smugly dismissed Peter Schiff’s concerns about the housing bubble and assured us that there was no recession on the horizon?
According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a recession is defined as a “significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months.” Often, this is understood as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth as measured by a country’s GDP.
It’s not breaking news, but the cost of producing pennies and nickels is still higher than their face value. This has been an issue for the past decade, with no progress being made. If the US Mint decides to change the composition of the penny and nickel, operators of vending machines and other coin-operated machines would have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars retrofitting their machines, while the Mint would save a sum that’s only in the tens of millions of dollars.
This week, the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, following the lead of New York and a growing number of state governments, denounced daily fantasy sites as “illegal gambling.”
Our friend Wang Wenbin informs us that his Chinese translation of Ron Paul’s Pillars of Prosperity is now available.
It seems that each new bubble brings forth claims that, although the bubble may be the result of artificially created demand, prices of this or that product will not fall and may even continue to rise. How many so-called real estate and financial planning “experts” claimed that the surest path to financial security was in buying the largest house possible with the least amount of one’s own money?
We often hear about homicide rates in Mexico and how they are among the highest in the world. While that is true for some parts of Mexico, much of Mexico — where nearly 80 percent of the population lives — has much lower rates than what are often quoted in the media.
Most of the high-homicide areas in Mexico are found along the US border, and to a certain extent reflect the work of drug cartels working to keep drug trafficking channels open to the US.
