The money supply growth rate rose in October, climbing to a twenty-eight-month high. The last time the growth rate was higher was during July of 2017, when the growth rate was 5.07 percent.

Christine Lagarde, the new president of the European Central Bank (ECB), has added a new green dimension to monetary policymaking. The charming Frenchwoman signaled that the ECB could buy green bonds, possibly as part of the reanimated bond purchase program (a form of QE). This could reduce the financing costs of green investment projects. If interest rates were negative, the green bond purchases would even amount to a subsidy for climate-friendly investment. This could strengthen environmental protection in times of tight expenditure constraints for overindebted governments.

Now that I’ve reached the ripe old of age of 42, I’ve been married for twenty years, and I’ve partially raised four children.

The older I get, the more I realize how very wrong I was to ever think that a disproportionate number of people older than me possessed some sort of special knowledge about how to properly run one’s life.

According to Mariana Mazzucato, the RM Phillips Professor in the Economics of Innovation at the University of Sussex, government is an important factor in the promotion of innovation and thus economic growth. In particular, she challenges the popular view that innovation happens in the private sector, with governments playing a limited role. Many commentators regard her as a revolutionary thinker that challenges the accepted dogma regarding the role of government in promoting innovations and economic growth.

If the current Democratic primary has illustrated one thing, it is that the fascination with socialised medicine in the American political conversation continues to double and redouble with each passing year. However, given the often-repeated slogan that the US is supposedly the only rich country without universal healthcare, conspicuously little attention has been paid to the actual experiences of those other countries, and whether or not adopting socialised medicine turned out to be as benevolent as US politicians are taking for granted.

A recent NYT article from this year’s economics Nobel Prize winners, Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, argues that “economists have somehow managed to hide in plain sight an enormously consequential finding from their research: Financial incentives are nowhere near as powerful as they are usually assumed to be.” Yet as we’ll see, Duflo and Banerjee cherry-pick studies that support their conclusion, while ignoring the body of literature that opposes it.

There is nothing new in monopoly capital gaining power and threatening free market capitalism. Government-favored and protected bankers, firms, and financiers have been around for centuries. But this time, monetary inflation and the nature of contemporary technological change have combined to raise the threat posed by these monopolists to an existential level. The ultimate barrier against this is the institution of sound money, at present virtually extinct in the world of politics.