John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) explains very well how to predict the winner of a beauty contest successfully. You must, he noted, think along the following lines: “(…) each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors (…). It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of use of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest.

On August 11, 2019, the presidential ticket of Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner pulled off a major electoral upset against incumbent President Mauricio Marci in the Argentine primary elections. Based on their performance last month, they’ll be able to compete in the general election on October 27, 2019.

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Recent Democratic debates focused on rising wealth inequality, as candidates introduced various ideas to roll back disparity by taxing the affluent and redistribute their wealth. This would punish working professionals and small business owners without capital market access nor legislative influence. Meanwhile, malinvestment reliant on central bank stimulus and the unproductive of “zombie firms” sustained by ultra-low rates would proliferate unabated.

According to the organizers of the global climate strike — the biggest in history — more than four million people went to the streets on Friday to demand more drastic action in the fight against global warming. 250,000 protested only in New York City, 330,000 in Australia, and perhaps most impressively, a full 1.4 million in Germany.

In school, we were taught how analogies, metaphors, and similes describe one thing in terms of others. While those terms may have faded from memory or been tossed on the scrap­heap of forgotten minutiae, they have turned out to be even more important than our teachers said, because much of what we “know” is by analogy to some­thing else (such as faded and scrapheap in the above sen­tence — memory doesn’t exactly fade like a pair of denims, and ideas aren’t literally thrown away, but the analogies make the meanings clearer and more vivid).

September marked the 70th anniversary of the publishing of Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action. This masterpiece is read more today than it was when it was first published. Every month, it is downloaded thousands of times from students all around the world as people seek out the truth in a world statured with lies.

Because of this, the Austrian school is larger today than ever before, and if you are reading this — you are the reason why.

Last month (August 14, 2019), the spread between the 10 year treasury yield and the 2 year treasury yield inverted. If you believe the headlines, this traditional recession indicator caused the markets to sell off with the Dow Jones closing with an 800 point loss (-3.1%) with the S&P 500 also losing 85 points (-2.9%).

So what is the yield curve and why does everyone worry that it signals a recession?

AI development has morphed into a geopolitical race with China and the United States in a dead heat to be the victor. While the 20th century may be widely thought of as the American century, the 21st will be defined by the leader in this pivotal technology. At least, that’s the impression given by most commentators and echoed in Kai-Fu Lee’s recent book, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order.