After many years of Mises University, Fellowships, the Rothbard Graduate Seminar, and our Scholars Conferences, thousands of students have become Mises Institute alums. We know that many of you have gone on to have quite impressive careers in economics, business, medicine, the physical sciences, and other fields, too. You’ve written books, made movies, invented things, educated others, and done a lot to change the world for the better.
In a few recent articles, The Economist has tackled the issue of economic predictions and forecasts: how to make them more accurate, timely, and reliable, or how to nowcast rather than forecast. Amidst more accolades for data series and newfangled statistical measures, an interesting point resulted from their investigation: the failure of all economic predictions—especially of government forecasting—to intuit a coming recession.
As part of their efforts to force federal intervention in Colorado to overturn local legalization of marijuana, the Republican attorneys general of Oklahoma and Nebraska have now taken to describing the State of Colorado as a “drug cartel”:
As I noted last month, once the oil price hit $40 per barrel, it was already below a ten-year low when adjusted for inflation. While still above the very-low prices of the 1990s in real terms, the oil price is in the midst of its biggest collapse since 2009. In real dollars, here’s the oil price at $40:
