Recent Podcast Episodes

Mark Thornton argues the AI data-center bond boom is the latest techno bubble—cheap-money malinvestment dressed up as a new era.

Economist Jeffery Degner joins Ryan McMaken to discuss why government plans to increase the birth rate have never actually worked. But offering to give voters free money for having children is often good politics.

Dr. Mark Thornton called the housing bubble in 2004. For four years, he was told he was wrong. He now says every paper-dollar asset you own is facing a very difficult future, and the AI buildout is the clearest warning sign he has seen since. In this interview with Jeremy Szafron, the Mises Institute senior fellow and author of The Skyscraper Curse explains why AI data centers are this cycle's record-breaking tower, why the bonds financing them run decades longer than the hardware, who gets stuck with the cost when a tenant stops paying, and why central banks no longer trusting each other is the best sign he has seen for gold.

Thornton also reacts to the Federal Reserve's report on Silicon Valley Bank published this week, Chairman Kevin Warsh's first rate hike in three years, and the drone attack on Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline that cut Aramco supply to European buyers.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, many seek to rehabilitate the War on Terror by appealing to the horror of 9/11, the right to respond, and the ideal of fighting terrorism. Many now demand that we judge an idealized “War on Terror” by its intentions rather than the war that actually occurred.

On this episode of Power and Market, Ryan, Connor, and Tho discuss what appears to be a coordinated call to regulate AI. Is this a benevolent plea to save humanity, or a thinly veiled attempt to establish a cartel?

The top AI CEOs aren't acting like they genuinely believe their technology will soon cause human extinction. But they are acting like the successful cartelizers of history, who recognized that state power is the best way to protect market dominance.

Both Brazil and the US had slavery in the 1800s, but the US economy flourished while Brazil’s languished. If slavery was the engine for US economic growth, as leftists claim, then why didn’t Brazil's economy match that of the US?

The latest reminder of the Federal Reserve's record of failure, which now extends longer than five years, comes with the most recent inflation measure.

Stijn Schmitz welcomes back Economist and Senior Fellow from the Mises Institute, Dr. Mark Thornton. Dr. Thornton paints a dire picture of the global economy, arguing that widespread socialist policies are driving governments to extreme borrowing, money printing, and protectionism. He points to the trade war and real conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East as direct consequences, which have disrupted diesel, crude oil, and fertilizer production. This creates a global pinch on agriculture and mining, threatening food supplies and crop yields, while strategic energy reserves are depleted, leaving economies vulnerable. The resulting higher fuel and food prices are squeezing consumers worldwide, whose wages are failing to keep pace with inflation, leading to a systematic harm of the working class while asset bubbles benefit the wealthy.

In the name of “saving” college sports, Congress steps well past its bounds to micromanage the NCAA.

Lenin wrote that the capitalists would provide the rope by which they would hang themselves. That certainly seems to be the case with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which received strong financial help from the center of crony capitalism itself: Wall Street.

By the close of the 1920s, business elites led by Wall Street had secured government enforcement of their cartels across banking, industry, transportation, and health.

World War I wrecked European finance and opened the door for the dollar to displace the pound. Patrick Newman follows Thomas Lamont and Paul Warburg’s ambitions for an imperial banking system, the Fed’s first inflationary boom and bust, and the 1920s high tide of the Money Lords.

The Beef Trust, the pure-food coalition, and the American Medical Association: three campaigns waged in the name of public health.

Barred from rate associations after 1897, the railroads formed communities of interest by buying their competitors’ stock—cartels in a disguised form.

Patrick Newman traces the Federal Trade Commission’s cartelizing arc: “advance advice,” uniform cost accounting, a brief Wilson reversal, Harding-Coolidge recapture, and Hoover’s subsidies and patent restrictions.

After the merger wave of 1898 and 1899, big business wanted relief from antitrust suits and protection from price-cutting.

Patrick Newman covers Jekyll Island, the National Citizens’ League organized as a front to manufacture grass-roots support, and the pivot once Congress refused the Aldrich plan.

Patrick Newman traces the National Banking System from Salmon P. Chase’s wartime bond sales and initially hostile relations with New York financiers through the pyramid of bankers’ balances that concentrated reserves on Wall Street.

Beginning with the Morrill Tariff of 1861, Patrick Newman documents protection sought and monopoly repeatedly denied. Market competition kept defeating attempts to corner markets.