Inventing the Individual, by Larry Siedentop, Belknap Press, 2014

I lived in Morocco a few decades ago and needed some furniture for our apartment. A college student I had befriended, Hamid, offered to take my cash and negotiate with the dealer for me while I drank coffee in a nearby qahwa because, as he said, the price of the furniture would triple if the merchant glimpsed an American within a block of his store.

Jeff Deist and Paul-Martin Foss discuss Ron Paul’s years fighting the Federal Reserve, why Carl Menger still matters, and why the Beltway types are wrong when they want to tinker with—rather than end—the Fed.

The headline from The Economist reads:

Tower of Babel: Is there such a thing as a Skyscraper Curse:

They explain the curse using my article without mentioning me, but at least they did reference my paper at the end of the article. Based on new empirical evidence apparently I am wrong about the connection between record setting skyscrapers and economic crisis. Drat, done in by the empirical evidence.

Mises Daily Friday by Antony Mueller: 

Brazil’s government has long been devoted to the idea that more government spending will create more economic prosperity. For a time, it seemed to work, but now reality and disillusionment have set in.

Europeans and the Japanese have long been fearful of price deflation. This fear is probably based on the fact that mainstream economists and central bankers have this fear and express it often. That fear is called apoplithorismosphobia. They believe that deflation is a force that sucks an economy down and destroys it much like a black hole that sucks objects in and destroys them. The only evidence they have is that price deflation occurred during the Great Depression. They don’t have a theory, reason or evidence.

Time reports that Rand Paul has come out in favor of a sizable boost to defense spending,

[U]nder Paul’s new plan, the Pentagon will see its budget authority swell by $76.5 billion to $696,776,000,000 in fiscal year 2016.[1]

Paul, positioning himself for a run in the presidential primaries, is echoing his fellow republicans who seem to be under the impression that defense spending is an endangered species in Washington, DC.

Its been over 6 years of ultra low interest rates referred to as ZIRP, or zero interest rate policy. We have been told to expect a normalization of interest rates soon, but now we are told that the Fed, specifically the New York Federal Reserve Bank is trying to figure out how to do that. 

For the millions of people who have suffered through an economics course the answer should be obvious, but for the Fed, things are not as clear as in the past.

[Editor’s note: In this article from 2015, economist John Cochran examines why higher interest rates are a key factor in repairing the damage of easy-money-induced business cycles. This topic remains timely and important because the Trump administration, like the Obama, Biden, and Bush administrations before it, remains committed to low-interest inflationary monetary policy. At the time of Cochran’s writing, the Yellen fed was doubling down on endless low-interest rate policy.