At the end of February 2023, the price of oil (WTI and Brent), Henry Hub and ICE natural gas, aluminum, copper, steel, corn, wheat, and the Baltic Dry Index are below the February 2022 levels.
The Supply Chain Index and the global supply-demand balance, published by Morgan Stanley, have declined to September 2022 levels. However, the latest inflation readings are hugely concerning.
Following the violent attack on Americans in the Mexican border city of Matamoros in early March, South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham stated that he was prepared to get tough and introduce legislation to set the stage for US military intervention in Mexico. The move would be a significant escalation in the long-running war on drugs that has been raging under the auspices of the United States for many decades to the dismay of many Latin American countries.
Every year on April 25, Anzac Day is observed in Australia and New Zealand. It originally commemorated Australians and New Zealanders who served and died during the First World War. It has since become a day of remembrance for all Australians and New Zealanders who have served and died in military conflicts.
On March 13th, the Pentagon rolled out its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2024. The results were—or at least should have been—stunning, even by the standards of a department that’s used to getting what it wants when it wants it.
With the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, financial markets all around the world are on edge. Despite promises from the Federal Reserve that a “soft landing” of the economy is on the way, all signs point to an imminent “crash landing”!
“This is all about regulation and the fact that at some point in time there was great advocacy for making sure that the regional banks and the smaller banks didn’t have to comply with some of the rules that perhaps would not have allowed them to get into this situation because there would’ve been stress testing and more oversight and more watching of what was going on.”
~ Rep. Maxine Waters (D), Financial Services Committee, March 15, 2023
The Soviet empire started to crumble around 1989. The time period between the forming of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the late 1940s and the retreat of Russia from Eastern Europe with the eventual collapse of communism in Russia is known as the Cold War. There was a great power confrontation in Europe that did not result in war.
Throughout its history, liberalism—the ideology today called “classical liberalism” or “libertarianism”—has suffered from the impression that it is primarily against things. This is not entirely wrong. Historically, liberalism coalesced as a recognizable and coherent ideology in opposition largely to mercantilism and absolutism throughout Western Europe. Over time, this opposition extended to socialism, protectionism, imperialism, aggressive warfare, and slavery as well.
Left Is Not Woke
by Susan Neiman
Polity Press, 2023; 155 pp.
There is much to dislike in this book. Susan Neiman, a former philosophy professor who now heads the “Einstein Discussion Group” in Potsdam, is a socialist who has good things to say about Communist East Germany and parrots every anticapitalist cliché in the book. I have blasted some of her work in earlier reviews. In Left Is Not Woke, though, she makes some good points, and I’m going to concentrate on them in this week’s column.
