We have a habit on our trading floor of playing Bob Dylan whenever the markets start selling off. We hardly ever play Dylan these days. Though I consider the Nobel Laureate something of a personal classical liberal icon, I don’t remember exactly how this office tradition ever started. But the connection is appropriate, a nod to the enigmatic genius who wrote anthems for freedom, against power and coercion, and, most relevantly, on change—irrepressible, revolutionary, and sometimes catastrophic change.

Growth in the supply of US dollars remained near a multi-year low in December, growing 2.9 percent, year over year.

There is nothing wrong with declining prices. What signifies industrial market economy under a commodity money such as gold is that prices of goods follow a declining trend.

According to Joseph Salerno,

1. Be a central government
2. Complain of volatility/risk in cryptocurrencies
3. Talk about banning cryptocurrencies
4. Cause panic and market fear/uncertainty
5. Complain of volatility/risk in cryptocurrencies

Why Liberalism Failed. By Patrick J. Deneen. Yale University Press, 2018. Xix + 225 pages.

In November 2017, the personal saving rate in the United States fell to a ten-year low, dropping to 2.9 percent. The last time the saving rate was lower than 2.9 percent was during November of 2007. 

Writing for the Wall Street Journal in 2005, federal judge and former U.S. deputy attorney general Laurence Silberman recalled how he was “shocked” to discover the extent the FBI abused its power to spy on Americans. 

The history of liberty and prosperity is inseparable from the practice of free enterprise and respect for the rule of law. Both are products of the spirit of classical liberalism. But a correct understanding of free enterprise, the rule of law, and liberalism (rightly understood) is greatly lacking in the world today.

[A selection from One Is a Crowd by Frank Chodorov]:

What is interventionism?

Interventionism means that the government does not restrict its activity to the preservation of order, or—as people used to say a hundred years ago—to “the production of security.” Interventionism means that the government wants to do more. It wants to interfere with market phenomena.