Booms and Busts

ZIRP has created massive asset bubbles throughout the world economy, but also has a diabolical impact on ordinary people who are largely disconnected to the bubbles.

It's the age-old question: is success the result of natural talent or simply hard work? This problem is especially important for entrepreneurs.

The world waits to see if next week is finally the week that the Fed announces its rate hike. Can the economy survive whatever small bump the Fed deals out? Perhaps, but that won’t change the inherent instability of our current monetary regime.

Central bankers would have us believe that creating money “out of thin air” is no problem as long as the “demand for money” increases. They also claim that gold-backed money is more prone to booms and busts. But they’re wrong on both counts.

Opponents of austerity have come out to denounce the idea that it’s bad for governments to borrow. They note that there are benefits to borrowing. The distinction they fail to make is that there’s a big difference between private borrowing and government borrowing.

Government failure was being felt everywhere this week, from the massive law-enforcement failure in Sen Bernardino to the crumbling economy in Brazil. Meanwhile, government tells us it only needs a little more money, power, and time to solve all problems.

Today's BLS employment data release may not be as "solid" as the media are reporting.

As the economy worsens, the Brazilian Congress this week announced that it will impeach the president of Brazil. Unfortunately, impeaching President Dilma Rousseff by itself will do little to fix Brazil’s economy when Brazilian politics remains dominated by anti-market forces.

There were many state and local elections in the US this week, but few of them will result in anything that will combat widely held and popular errors about central banking, drug prohibition, and the global environment.