Switzerland’s central bank, the Swiss National Bank (SNB), lost $3.6 billion in 2023,1 after a gigantic loss of $150 billion in 2022. But after booking these losses, and properly subtracting them from its capital, the SNB still had positive capital of over $70 billion.
Leftwing academics claim that blacks in America are oppressed. They call for reparations and affirmative action programs to help them. But these people are hypocrites and liars. How do we know this? When a black person doesn’t share their views, they act ruthlessly. Such people have to be eliminated. The ‘woke” left doesn’t care about blacks or anybody else who doesn’t parrot their views. Roland Fryer found this out the hard way.
Last week President Biden delivered a dark and angry speech meant to convince the low percentage of Americans who still feel positive about his presidency that everything is fine and will only get better if he is re-elected for a second term.
Many economic pundits predict that the United States and much of the world is either in a recession or about to enter one, depending upon one’s definition of the term “recession.” This brief essay is not intended to be a comprehensive explanation of what causes such economic cycles but rather the proper way to end them as quickly as possible.
If one follows news relating to the economy, they surely have come across certain mainstream rhetoric in support of the Federal Reserve System. Everyone is familiar with the typical claims that the Federal Reserve strives for maximized employment and low inflation, and that the Fed is the regulator of the banking industry. But king of them all is of the supposed political neutrality of the Federal Reserve.
Artificial intelligence (AI) cannot distinguish fact from fiction. It also isn’t creative or can create novel content but repeats, repackages, and reformulates what has already been said (but perhaps in new ways).
President Biden needs an economics lesson. Demonstrating his ignorance of economics, his recent State of the Union speech regaled us with a laundry list of legal business pricing strategies that he wants to see restricted or banned by federal agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
One of the first laws of economics—in fact, the condition that makes economics possible and necessary—is scarcity. On page one of Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell wrote, “Without scarcity, there is no need to economize—and therefore no economics.”
While defining scarcity and its critical role in economics, I like to ask my students in a Christian school a question to tease this out: Would scarcity have existed in the Garden of Eden?
One would guess the folly of rent control regulations needn’t be explained any further. If rents are held in place by government edict, landlords have no incentive to maintain apartment units to attract renters, the housing stock ultimately deteriorates, and homelessness increases. But, as Bloomberg reports, “Tougher rent control, returning worldwide, destroys $75 billion in property value.
One thing to be said in favor of the American conservative establishment is the fact that they at least pay lip service to the idea of a free market. They have also memorized the typical talking points in its defense, including the greater prosperity it provides, the morality of private property, and the impossibility of successful central planning. On this last point, however, mainstream conservatives generally fail to extend the logic to perhaps its most obvious modern example: the catastrophic effects of American foreign policy.
