Economists, bankers, fund managers, and investors around the world are absolutely fixated on the Federal Reserve’s anticipated announcement this week, with many fearing that a rate hike could trigger more shocks like the recent Black Monday selloff.
In a world of social media and 24-hour news cycles, it’s fair to say Wednesday’s FOMC meeting in the Eccles Building has been the most widely reported and discussed central bank action in history.
Reports that the official unemployment rate has fallen to 5.1 percent may appear to vindicate the policies of easy money, corporate bailouts, and increased government spending. However, even the mainstream media has acknowledged that the official numbers understate the true unemployment rate. This is because the government’s unemployment figures do not include the 94 million Americans who have given up looking for work or who have settled for part-time employment. John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics estimates the real unemployment rate is between 23 and 24 percent.
There are so many skyscrapers being built in China that I have not been able to keep track of them all. The “Walking Stick” building has just become the second tallest skyscraper in the world. This does not qualify as a genuine worldwide “skyscraper signal,” but it does represent a signal for China. This provide another giant hint that the Skyscraper Curse is looming, especially for China.
Mises Daily Tuesday by William L. Anderson:
Progressives once bragged about how their economic policies favored whites over blacks in the job market. Nowadays, Progressives claim to be helping racial minorities, although their economic policies remain exactly the same.
Since 2008, Marvel Studios, now owned by Disney, has been cranking out at least one big-budget new movie each year, with much success. The movies of the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe — which includes the post-2007 Marvel movies about the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and the Avengers — have combined to gross more than 8.5 billion dollars.
Ludwig von Mises coined the term “Montaigne Fallacy” to describe the famous 16th century French essayist’s blunder in describing market transactions as inherently exploitative. Murray Rothbard similarly took Montaigne to the woodshed in his History of Economic Thought.
“Buy land — they’re not making any more!” is an old investing chestnut, and a common sense one to boot. Economically, it’s also completely false.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, we make land all the time. It just doesn’t look like land.
Mainstream historians and economists tend to see the period from about 1900 to 1920 as a glorious time for the Progressive agenda. In 1913 alone, the government headed by Progressive Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Reserve System, direct election of US Senators via voters (and not state legislators), and the federal income tax.
The failures of socialist states are obvious and horrifying, yet there never seems to be a shortage of intellectuals eager to churn out new schemes for central planning. Malcolm Harris discusses the latest of these suggestions, which claims that the traditional economic problems of socialism can be resolved by harnessing the power of modern data collection and computing, through a kind of “cyber Stalinism.”
