Great News from Auburn University: 

Mises Institute Academic Vice President Joe Salerno was just appointed to the John V. Denson II Endowed Professorship in the Department of Economics in the College of Liberal Arts.  Joe will teach graduate and undergraduate courses and sit on PhD dissertation committees. 

Dr. Salerno has taught economics at Pace University for many years, but this new appointment allows Joe to work more often with graduate students and to shape dissertation work and other graduate-level research. 

Although leftists often like to condemn nullification as right-wing kookery, the left is quite good at employing the tactic.

Certainly, the most successful nullification trend going on right now is in state refusals to enforce federal drug laws. Four states (Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska) have all unilaterally declared recreational marijuana to be legal.

October 30, 1929. A brisk autumn’s day in Manhattan. The Savoy-Plaza Hotel’s thirty-three stories cast a long shadow over Central Park. At the base of the hotel a financier lies freshly fallen, motionless, while his last breath, wrenched from the lungs by force of impact, is now a red mist of gore in the air.

Asset price inflation, a disease whose source always lies in monetary disorder, is not a new affliction. It was virtually inevitable that the present wild experimentation by the Federal Reserve — joined by the Bank of Japan and ECB — would produce a severe outbreak. And indications from the markets are that the disease is in a late phase, though still short of the final deadly stage characterized by pervasive falls in asset markets, sometimes financial panic, and the onset of recession.

Dan Price, the CEO of Gravity Payments, took a $930,000 pay cut to raise the minimum salary of his employees to $70,000. The plan was announced in April 2015, and set to be completed over the course of three years. Both his employees (especially the ones with a larger pay increase) and proponents of income equality celebrated the move. It garnered considerable publicity and rippled through social media, with mostly positive but some negative reactions.

The conservative media (specifically Breitbart and CNS) are reporting that labor participation rates are at a 38 year low:

A record 93,770,000 Americans were not in the American labor force last month, and the labor force participation rate remained at 62.6 percent, exactly where it was in June -- a 38-year low, the Labor Department reported on Friday.

CBS Reports:

 A U.S. Coast Guard crew from Alameda stopped a semi-submersible vessel carrying more than 16,000 pounds of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific Ocean last month — the largest bust of its kind in Coast Guard history.

This must have been very painful for Noah Smith. So painful, in fact, that he felt the need to hurl half a dozen guilt-by-association charges at the Austrian School before admitting that it’s the Austrian concept of malinvestment that probably best explains the enormous bubbles in the Chinese economy right now. 

We’re regularly told by the Fed and defenders of the current incumbent president that the economy is humming along pretty well. Yes, there are concerns, we are told, the US is performing below its “potential output” level, but we’ve achieved the most that can be expected under the circumstances. People who write columns for the New York Times and who compile government reports are doing pretty well. Unfortunately for those who don’t write columns or enjoy comfortable government jobs, things seem less rosy.