President López Obrador of Mexico has surprisingly been a voice of fiscal sanity, refusing to embrace the sorts of enormous stimulus packages that are now so popular worldwide.
Arguments over the gold standard are not merely technical disagreements. Rather, the gold standard often serves as a proxy for “sound money,” which was a central element in the classical liberal tradition of limiting government’s ability to wreak havoc on society.
Debt is neither free nor irrelevant, as interventionists want us to believe, even if interest rates are low. More debt means less growth and a slower exit from the crisis, with lower productivity growth and a tepid employment improvement.
Euro governments are planning to use the banking system for widespread bailouts in the wake of the COVID-19 shutdowns. This could bring about a new financial crisis.
The COVID panic gave the world's regimes a new reason to claim that physical cash should be outlawed. But this is just one of many strategies now in play to end the relative privacy and freedom cash provides.
Central bank policies that rely on ultralow interest rates have been shown to bring economic stagnation. Unfortunately, central bankers don't seem to have any other ideas.
When the current panic and crisis began, we were already in the late stages of a long asset price bubble. The crisis has exposed the fragility of the current system and we won't be going back to where we were before.
The massive bailout of indebted sectors that already had overcapacity and were in process of obsolescence may also drive the largest wave of malinvestment in decades. If the previous recoveries came with poor wage and capital expenditure growth and high debt, the next one will likely be even...
