In these times of war in the Middle East, I often think of my late friend, the great and brilliant Joe Sobran. If Joe could be with us today, it’s clear what he would be saying. Why does the US support Israel uncritically? How is doing so in our national interest? What about the rights of Palestinians to their land?
How do we know he would say these things? Because this is exactly what he did said in 2002.
According to the Federal Reserve, credit card delinquencies increased by 50 percent in 2023, while consumer debt grew to 17.5 trillion dollars. A recent survey by Clever Real Estate found that three in five Americans have credit card debt and that 23 percent of Americans increase their credit card debt every month. The survey also found that 48 percent of Americans (including 59 percent of millennials) use credit cards for essential living expenses.
Stephen Anderson, in his Mises Wire essays of February 1 (“Are Bankruptcies of Some US States in the Future?”) and February 23 (“US States Have a Long History of Defaulting”), worries that some US states may be on the precipice of bankruptcy.
Investor and author Doug Casey recently wrote that most economists “are political apologists masquerading as economists.” He says they are like witch doctors pretending to be neurosurgeons. They “prescribe the way they would like the world to work and tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for more power.” The discipline of economics, says Casey, “has been turned into the handmaiden of government in order to give scientific justification for things the government wants to do.”
Many economists think the Federal Reserve can use Phillips Curve tradeoffs between inflation and unemployment to guide Fed macro stabilization policy. Inflationary Fed policies may act as a monetary stimulus, to regulate unemployment. Data from 1948 to 1985 indicates that the Phillips Curve doesn’t actually exist. Does the data since 1985 reveal stable Phillips Curve tradeoffs- estimates of the effects of inflation on unemployment that may guide future policies?
Something’s rotten under the Las Vegas Convention Center and it turns out it’s a chemical sludge with the “consistency of a milkshake,” reports Bloomberg Businessweek. This sludge is a byproduct of Elon Musk’s Boring Company tunneling from the Las Vegas Convention Center to the Encore and Westgate hotels. These tunnels don’t feature rapid transit but instead individual Teslas ferrying carloads of convention goers at just 40 mph.
There are others, besides the Austrians, who acknowledge the crucial role of monetary policy and even blame the Federal Reserve for the Great Depression. Some scholars, which we can greatly appreciate, even go so far as to rightly criticize Franklin D.
During the most recent commercial real estate bubble, two things happened in tandem. First, due to the Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy, savers were unable to invest their cash at a decent rate of return. Second, prices of illiquid assets inflated in an extreme manner, riding on cheap debt and the rush of investors stretching for yield on their capital.
