September 17, 2019 was a significant day in American economic history. On that day, the New York Federal Reserve began emergency cash infusions into the repurchasing (repo) market. This is the market banks use to make short-term loans to each other. The New York Fed acted after interest rates in the repo market rose to almost 10 percent, well above the Fed’s target rate.
It is generally the case that simple concepts in nature produce incredible complexity. This applies to the genome, where simple base pairs have evolved to express complex and multifunctional instructions that would take thousands of lines of code for any human to create. This applies to the economy, where simple ideas such as the price system become infinitely complex at scale. Any free market advocate should be familiar with this proposition—Austrians, for example, often offer simple solutions, because they understand how emergent complexity might best resolve a given problem.
The shutdown of the American economy by government decree should end. The lasting and far-reaching harms caused by this authoritarian precedent far outweigh those caused by the COVID-19 virus. The American people—individuals, families, businesses—must decide for themselves how and when to reopen society and return to their daily lives.
As a data professional with a data governance and data analytics background in multibillion dollar industries, I understand that the messy task of aggregating data from numerous and disparate sources ensures a cloudy data pool, at best. The adage “Garbage in, garbage out” holds true, and anywhere we have human touch points, we have the potential for errors in our data. This is true for all data types, whether medical, automotive, financial, or otherwise.
A reader, A.B. Sterner, writes:
Toilet paper, for reasons I still can’t grasp, is experiencing a severe (in store) shortage in a lot of areas of the country. Yet in some areas price ceilings—in the form of “anti-gouging” laws—have been put in place to keep those prices artificially low, despite the unprecedented increase in demand.
A leading trope of the contemporary environmental movement is that indigenous peoples residing in a precapitalist order are particularly skillful at managing the earth’s resources. These groups are often portrayed in the media as being in harmony with the natural environment. Without a doubt many indigenous groups are animistic and therefore may hold nature in high regard. But venerating nature does not preclude one from engaging in activities that have a deleterious impact on the natural environment.
On Friday, Pope Francis delivered a special sermon to pray for an end to the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, the depressing scenery of the deserted St. Peter’s Square on the rainy night matched the words of the Holy Father:
