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The US economy is imprisoned, most of the population is under house arrest, and the inmates in Washington are running the asylum. And yet while the nation appears to be walking the green mile, investors residing in the Wall Street cell block have been extended pardons from the market gods.

On April 15, the Federal Reserve released its latest Beige Book. This is the third of the eight yearly Beige Books, which are released prior to scheduled Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings. The book is just under thirty pages long and provides a “summary of commentary of current economic conditions” for the period from February 25 to April 6, 2020.

Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand held very different views about the origins of Nazism, and in this article I am going to describe these differences. My aim is limited to that. I’m not going to assess these arguments. Rand’s explanation for the rise of Nazism is found in Leonard Peikoff’s 1982 book The Ominous Parallels. Although Rand didn’t write the book, she fully endorsed it, and if you compare the book’s style with that of Peikoff’s other books, you will find it hard to resist the feeling that she revised the text.

Information on total deaths through March 28 shows no indication of a general surge in deaths in the United States. It’s quite possible we’ll see April’s total mortality begin to show levels well above normal, but the weekly data we have so far show no indication of this.

We now have data up through week 13 (the week ending March 28) for this year, as can be found here. As of April 15, the week 13 data is not yet quite complete, although the CDC lists that data as 93 percent complete.

On this episode of Part Of The Problem, Dave Smith interviews Jeff Deist. Dave and Jeff discuss the future of a Post COVID-19 world; how rights once taken are rarely given back; and how a free market would be better prepared for a crisis than our system of regulation.

On Tuesday in an interview with Reuters, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Gita Gopinath, said that one hundred countries seek pandemic aid.