The gold price kissed $3,500 last week before backing off. The yellow metal’s price has churned violently up and down $50 to $100 daily. For some gold bugs, this price level seemed unimaginable without there being shooting in the streets. It’s the central banks that are violently depreciating the value of their currencies.

Most economists use correlations among the various pieces of unique historical data to empirically estimate the future direction of an economy. For instance, it was observed that the lagged changes in money supply were positively correlated with the growth rate of gross domestic product (GDP). Based on the correlation, some economists mistakenly attempt to assess the prospects for economic growth in terms of GDP via past changes in money supply. According to this line of thinking, it would appear that the lagged money supply growth causes economic growth.

Lower income countries like the D.R. often face much higher relative costs than rich countries when it comes to dealing with waves of migrants. 

US airstrikes on Yemen killed 95 civilians and injured 192 last week. Very little US trade requires the Suez Canal, so this is about subsidizing the State of Israel. 

Trump’s trade war is so successful that he’s planning to bail out the farmers who will suffer under the trade war. 

62% think tariffs will be a net liability in the long run. Even more think it will be costly in the short run. They’re right because tariff hikes are just tax increases on Americans.

I apologize in advance for my use of Keynesian language, but what an impressive multiplier effect our annual cornerstone event, Mises University, has. Last summer, 13 of our 18 faculty members were themselves graduates of Mises University. They all went on to earn their PhDs and have become the next generation of scholars leading the Austrian tradition!

A common critique of capitalism is that it places “profits over people.” But this implies a false choice—the idea that we must choose one or the other. But the reality is that people can’t survive without profits. Every living creature must make a net energy profit—if it doesn’t consume more calories than it burns, it dies. Living organisms have a built-in alarm—hunger—that warns them when they’re running a deficit, but organizations have no such mechanism.

The foundations of the welfare state can be found in Bismark’s idea of the social state, which, at first, was used to fight socialists on a political level, but hell is full of good intentions. Bismark in the 1880s created compulsory insurance for accident, health, disability, and age (pensions). He called them “state socialism” and explained that all measures were socialist, and the state had to adapt to a little more socialism.