In his writings, Milton Friedman blamed central bank policies for causing the Great Depression. According to Friedman, the Federal Reserve failed to pump enough reserves into the banking system to prevent a collapse in the money stock (see Free to Choose). In response to this failure, Friedman argued the money stock M1, which stood at $28.264 billion in October 1929; fell to $19.039 billion by April 1933 – a decline of almost 33%.
This week America celebrated its Independence day, a holiday dedicated to honoring, as Ryan McMaken noted, “a document that promotes secession, rebellion, and what the British at the time regarded as treason.” In spite of our own government’s attempts to hijack it for simply another celebration of sterile patriotic pride, the success of America’s inherently radical revolution is a moment of
In December 2016, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) nationalized Ukraine’s largest private bank for what we now know was an incorrect understanding of the facts. It remains unclear who benefitted from this expropriation.
But it wasn’t just a misunderstanding. The nationalization of PrivatBank very likely was the result of a still-unexplained refusal by the NBU to accept the financial reality of the situation.
First they came for the inmates’ cash. . . .
In Britain as in America, the modern metropolitan left at this point seems to be defined by little more than its bemusing inclination toward self-sabotage.
One of the ironies of the U.S. national-security state’s never-ending efforts to effect regime change in Cuba is that the United States ended up adopting and embracing many of the dark-side policies and practices of what one might expect a communist regime to engage in. After the conversion of the U.S. government to a national-security state after World War II, the notion was that in order to defeat the Reds during the Cold War, America needed to become like them.
Patrick Buchanan is an informative and interesting writer. On foreign policy, especially, he’s long been one of the most reasonable voices among high-level American pundits.
When it comes to cultural matters, however, Buchanan has long held to a peculiar and empirically questionable version of American history in which the United States was once a mono-culture in which everyone was once happily united by “a common religion,” a “common language,” and a “common culture.”
A few months before the 2016 election, the Obama administration was claiming that the federal government needed to seize control of the election process because, according to CNN ”Vladimir Putin’s hackers could wreak havoc” on the electoral process.
