US presidential candidate Donald Trump made more waves yesterday by suggesting he might attempt to reduce the US national debt by renegotiating with creditors. “Such remarks by a major presidential candidate,” intoned the New York Times solemnly, “have no modern precedent.
From the beginning of history sincere reformers as well as demagogues have sought to abolish or at least to alleviate poverty through state action. In most cases their proposed remedies have only served to make the problem worse.
Martin Wolf, associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, seems to have forgotten the nature of interest rates and their coordinating role. According to him, central banks are not to blame in the persistence of low or negative interest rates. He writes: “We must regard ultralow rates as symptoms of our disease, not its cause.”
US real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose at a 0.5% annualized in Q1 after a 1.4% increase in Q4. This was below the 0.7% median projection in a Bloomberg survey.
Non-residential fixed investment fell 5.9% annualized, the biggest decline since the Q2 2009.
The yearly growth rate of GDP eased to 1.9% in Q1 from 2% in the previous quarter.
A declining trend in the momentum growth of AMS (our monetary measure for the US) since October 2011 continues to undermine various bubble activities and hence the growth rate of GDP.
Citing grave concerns that “this banknote could facilitate illicit activities,” those desperate inflationists intrepid crime fighters at the ECB have announced that production of the 500-euro note--the so-called “Bin Laden note”--will cease at the end of 2018.
Following his recent article on Austrian Business Cycle Theory and the Great Depression, Jonathan Newman, along with Joseph Salerno, join Tom Woods on the latest episode of the Tom Woods Show.
The Daily Show has recently been waging an ideological campaign in the pursuit of raising compensation for female soccer players. It turns out that the women’s teams aren’t paid as much as the men’s teams.
The Daily Show‘s key piece of “evidence,” a chart showing comparative compensation rates, has been making the rounds in social media today:
Earlier this week, the Reserve Bank of Australia, the country’s central bank, lowered its key interest rate from 2.0 percent to 1.75 percent, which is a record low.
In a recent article we had a brief look at Ragnar Frisch’s (1895–1973) vision of econometric model building. As mentioned, Frisch was the first economist chosen over Mises to win the Nobel Prize in 1969. In fact, there was a second one in the same year. Frisch won the prize jointly with Dutchman Jan Tinbergen (1903–1994), who applied Frischian econometrics for the first time in large-scale macro models by the end of the 1930s.
And then there was one.
