While the world stresses about #metoo, Trump’s tweets, and other cultural nonsense, the latest Grant’s Interest Rate Observer is blunt about “the most consequential prices in capitalism — interest rates…” Rates are “stuck under the bureaucratic thumb.” There is no mystery or debate, “It’s as plain as meatloaf that something is wrong with credit.”

In November 2017, Spaniards learned that the US Secretary of Commerce had decided to tax the import of black olives — between 2.31 and 7.25 percent — because these were being sold below market price. That is, the Trump administration decided the Spaniards were guilty of “dumping“ olives.

We’ve heard many excuses from the Venezuelan state: “private property can’t not be protected under such a system,” and “schools of economics will close because we won’t need economists to control monetary policy,” and “we tried that in the past,” and “our currency is a national symbol,” and “it destroys jobs!” Many have been the sophisms spread by Venezuelan “intellectuals” and politicians over decades to demonize what should be one of the most natural market processes of a society: monetary freedom, o

For many years, property owners with vacant buildings in London, Ontario have applied for a 30 percent rebate on their property taxes. However, City Council decided to cut the rebate in half for 2018, then eliminate it entirely at year’s end.

It’s a new year and that means we are in for another year of the same rehashed political partisanship disguised as sound economic analysis.

The Senate Banking Committee today is hosting the head of the SEC and CFTC to discuss cryptocurrency.

This past Tuesday afternoon, I was speaking with a reporter who was interested in the positive effects of infrastructure spending that occurred in the form of fiscal “stimulus” in my part of the country, back during the dark days of the Great Recession, around 2009 and 2010. How did this help our region, he wanted to know? 

“Democracy Dies in the Darkness” is the proud motto of the Washington Post. But, considering the past week’s frenzy, the new motto for much of the media and many Democrats is, “Disclosure is the Death of Democracy.” Unfortunately, the uproar around the release of the Nunes memo totally missed the deadly political peril posed by pervasive federal secrecy.