Back when I was a construction lender, I thought the perfect construction loan would pay off after one day, just long enough to collect the loan fee. After all, time is your enemy in construction lending. Any of a myriad of unknowns can keep construction from being completed: the market may evaporate for what is being built, interest rates may rise to make a loan uneconomic, construction costs could increase to require a loan modification or more borrower equity (good luck), just to name a few.

Jamaica is a small island in the British West Indies, but despite its stature, this tiny nation has elicited the attention of global elites. In politics, Jamaica’s voting behavior at the United Nations is closely monitored by her neighbors in the Caribbean and the global community because she commands influence. Due to historical and cultural complexities, Jamaica is a magnet for academic research, and writing about the country has manifested into a cottage industry. Consistent with her fame, those who study Jamaica tend to be heavyweights in academia.

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[This article is chapter 6 of Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities.

Although the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank’s message regarding interest rate cuts seems clear, reiterating their commitment to reducing inflation, the market is expecting between five and six interest rate cuts, between 125 and 150 basis points, in the next twelve months.

I previously produced a chart like this one below. There I showed the US Federal Reserve Liabilities normalised to 1914 dollars. This has the effect of visually amplifying the massive currency creation around the World War I and World War II. It does not change anything but puts them all into the same dollar value terms and so we are comparing ‘apples with apples’.