Between 2019 and 2022, the fortune of India’s Gautam Adani swelled from $9 billion to $127 billion. As the value of his seven publicly traded companies—providers of everything from natural gas to digital services—soared, he was briefly the world’s second-richest person. His meteoric rise caught the attention of Hindenburg Research, a small US investment firm devoted to profiting by exposing corporate malfeasance.
After French protestors took the street to complain about the increase in the retirement age, I read quite a few jokes in social media about how protesting in France is the local pastime.
Does cheap money and credit make us richer? Does more money and credit create more stuff, or better stuff? Do they make us happier and more productive? Or do these twin forces actually distort the economy, misallocate resources, and degrade us as people?
Jeff Deist: First of all, congratulations on your new book The Price of Time. It was fantastic.
Edward Chancellor (EC): I’m glad you enjoyed it.
JD: I ask all authors this question, especially authors of weighty books. Was it worth it, in terms of the opportunity cost in your own life?
On January 17, the Saudi minister of finance, Mohammed Al-Jadaan, announced that the Saudi state is open to selling oil in currencies other than the dollar. “There are no issues with discussing how we settle our trade arrangements, whether it is in the US dollar, whether it is the euro, whether it is the Saudi riyal,” Al-Jadaan told Bloomberg TV.
The value of time, i.e., time preference or the higher valuation of want-satisfaction in nearer periods of the future as against that in remoter periods, is an essential element in human action. It determines every choice and every action. There is no man for whom the difference between sooner and later does not count. The time element is instrumental in the formation of all prices of all commodities and services.
—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Taxes Have Consequences: An Income Tax History of the United States
By Arthur B. Laffer, Brian Domitrovic, and Jeanne Cairns Sinquefield
Post Hill Press, 2022, xxv + 413 pp.
Does cheap money and credit make us richer? Does more money and credit create more stuff, or better stuff? Do they make us happier and more productive? Or do these twin forces actually distort the economy, misallocate resources, and degrade us as people?
