Reuters reports:
Any changes to the rate that the Federal Reserve pays to banks on excess reserves will take effect immediately upon approval, rather than at the end of a two-week maintenance period, the central bank announced on Thursday.
The change is being made to improve the ability of the Fed to use the payments made to banks on excess reserves as a tool for raising its target interest rate.
As election season ramps up, many people are falling into political camps and assuming that their candidate will be wholly different from either the current administration or the contenders in the other camp. But for the past eighty years, United States presidents have been remarkably similar once in office. Most presidents, whatever their promises as candidates (usually to shrink parts of government) end up waging wars overseas and expanding government control here at home. The problem is not any one politician, be it Barack Obama, or George W. Bush, or Ronald Reagan.
In this paper from The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Peter Boettke and Christopher Coyne provide a brief overview of the history of development economics (i.e., understanding what makes rich countries rich) while further analyzing what role, if any, the economist has in guiding public policy on these matters:
Mark Thornton is interviewed by Phil Pepin on The Pursuit of Freedom radio show. They discuss Dr. Thornton’s experiences teaching Austrian economics, the development of the Mises Institute and Austrian economics from the beginning, and the growing acceptance (and opposition) of Austrian ideas in the United States.
At the Austrian Economics Research Conference this year, Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, discussed the many ways that the blockchain may be used in the future to facilitate exchange. Summarized in the most simplistic way possible: the blockchain, Byrne says, allows parties to exchange without first having to establish trust with each other, and without having to rely on legal authorities for enforcement. Naturally, this has implications for the usefulness of state authorities in regulating exchange.
Pope Francis’s new encyclical “On Care for Our Common Home” has been released to much acclaim from the mainstream media.
The Foundation for Economic Education The Freeman 1981
New York attorney Joe Patrice at Above the Law (a popular blog for lawyers) has issued a screed condemning Texas’s creation of a gold “bank” and has declared it contrary to the so-called supremacy clause in the United States constitution.
