The timing of America’s announcement on new tariffs is circumstantially connected with China. In an announcement of enormous importance, a date has finally been set for trading in oil futures denominated in yuan. China’s suppliers of roughly 8.5 million barrels of oil per day are agreeing to take yuan for their oil, not dollars, and the new futures contract allows them to hedge the yuan into dollars, euros, yen, or even gold.
[The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, and the Freemasons to Facebook by Niall Ferguson, Penguin Press, 2018.]
The always provocative Justin Raimondo, longtime editor of Antiwar.com, has a new column in Chronicles Magazine that asks a very simple question: Whatever happened to the libertarian movement?
JEFF DEIST: How does a kid from New Jersey get interested in economics, much less decide to get a PhD?
JOE SALERNO: Well, I didn’t really plan it. I think it all began back in fifth grade when my mother’s cousin visited from Italy, and during the course of conversation, he revealed that he was a member of the Italian Communist Party. My father, a New Deal Democrat who had voted for JFK, was also an ardent anti-communist. He got into a big argument with the cousin and then threatened to throw him out.
The Federal Reserve continues to slowly increase the federal funds rate from 1.5 to 1.75 percent today, the first such decision of the Jerome Powell era. More interesting is that, when asked during his press conference, Chairman Powell dismissed the idea of the Fed’s Interest on Excess Reserves (IOER) policy as a subsidy to Wall Street.
We are long past the point at which constitutional arguments have much hope of restraining the American political class, either at home or abroad. They are still worth making, though, since they serve to show the two major parties’ contempt for American law and tradition.
In the wake of the Vietnam War Congress passed the War Powers Resolution of 1973. As the history books would have it, Congress thereby restrained presidential war powers and reasserted traditional congressional prerogatives in foreign policy as envisioned by the Constitution.
Not so. Not even close to being so.
It is common practice in DC for politicians to stuff spending bills with all sorts of additional bad legislation — the policy equivalent of being overcharged for a meal that gives you food poisoning. This week’s vote is no exception.
According to most economic experts, when an economy falls into a recession the central bank can pull it out of the slump by means of money pumping. This way of thinking implies that money pumping can somehow grow the economy. Indeed US historical evidence supposedly does show that easy money policy seems to work.
