In the Senate Intelligence Committee secret vote today on whether to confirm Trump nominee Gina Haspel as chief of the CIA, she will likely again be praised for promising to “speak truth to power.” This has recently become one of the favorite accolades in the least trusted city in America. But will Americans be as gullible this time around?
Last month, we reported that money-supply growth accelerated for the first time after a year-long period of falling growth rates, at the end of which money-supply growth fell to a near-ten-year low of 2.6 percent, year over year.
In March of this year growth rates had headed upward, rising to a year-over-year growth rate of 5.1 percent.
In April, however, growth rates lessened again, coming in at a rate of 4.3 percent, year over year.
Many economists who subscribe to some version of the Phillips Curve have been puzzled by the tepid nominal wage growth in recent years, even though the official unemployment rate has collapsed and we should be in “overheating” territory at this point.
According to the Census Bureau, household formation in 2017 fell to the lowest levels seen since 2010. In 2017, total households in the United States grew 0.32 percent, which was only slightly above the historic low of 0.30 in 2010, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Last year I noted that America would benefit from Trump acting more like Putin - at least in terms of military spending. After all, while Trump and Republicans were pushing for a $80 billion increase in the defense war budget, Putin’s government had reduced their’s to a total of around $50 billion.
Jeff Deist joined the Tom Woods Show yesterday to discuss whether the term “Libertarian” is still useful.
To quote Tom Woods, “This one’s a doozy, my friends.”
On May 4 and 5, 2018, Warren E. Buffett (born 1930) and Charles T. Munger (born 1924), both already legends during their lifetime, held the annual shareholders’ meeting of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Approximately 42,000 visitors gathered in Omaha, Nebraska, to attend the star investors’ Q&A session.
I frequently say “Washington D.C. will never fix America’s problems. Washington D.C. is America’s problem!”
People often take that to mean I don’t think we can fix America’s problems. That’s not the case. I just believe that instead of focusing on D.C., we need to start with change at the local and state level. From there, it will filter up to Washington D.C.
While the euro crisis seems far away as all Eurozone countries ran government deficits below 3 percent of GDP, there is one problem for the euro that quietly keeps growing: the unresolved banking crisis. And this is not a small problem. The Eurosystems´and euro banks´ balance sheets totaled €30 trillion in January 2018, that is about 291 percent of GDP.
European banks are in trouble for several reasons.
