The Fed

Mark Thornton traces today’s tangled web of paper money, debt, war, and AI malinvestment—from John Law’s Mississippi Bubble to the Fed’s latest distortions.

The Fed wants to keep interest rates low so the government can borrow on the cheap. But bond markets are driving up interest rates as inflation isn't going away.

With an election just six weeks away, we can count on the Federal Reserve to open the money spigots to bolster the economy. We will pay later—but we will pay.

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

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.

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.

Mark Thornton argues Washington’s political theater cannot paper over the mounting costs of war, sanctions, debt, and inflation.

Mark Thornton argues Washington is trying to manage bond yields, suppress gold’s warning signal, and sell AI as an inflation cure—even as debt and malinvestment pile up.

The war could not have been financed under the old gold standard.

Because of Keynesian inflationary bias, economists, politicians, and journalists celebrated the huge financial moves that Ben Bernanke made in 2008 and beyond to deal with the financial meltdown and its aftermath. But Bernanke’s moves didn’t help the economy; they made things worse.