As the world’s second-largest economy attempts to return to its precrisis glory days, Beijing could potentially deal with a new pandemic that could have a sweeping effect on financial markets at home and abroad: a bond default crisis.
By mid March—when barely 12 percent of the population had been vaccinated—total excess mortality was back within 1 percent of 2019 levels. In other words, the number of deaths in the US is collapsing back to where it was before the official start of the pandemic.
Opponents of bitcoin now claim that bitcoin mining causes global warming and is an environmental threat. But the boom-bust cycles caused by central banks and their fiat money are far worse than any carbon footprint bitcoin can produce.
In Las Vegas, airline passengers plummeted 64 percent during 2020, and the convention business has collapsed. For Vegas, there are troubling signs that the world is not in a hurry to spend freely on extravagant face-to-face meetings.
The fact that colonial empires often differ significantly in their outcomes can serve to provide us with insights into what sorts of government policies are the most and least harmful.
Electing better planners won't make socialism work. Central planning fails because planning without the feedback mechanisms of the market is an impossible task.
In the early years of QE, many economists warned that the Fed’s unprecedented monetary inflation would cause a significant increase in consumer prices. In this chapter, we’ll assess several popular explanations for why the Fed’s monetary inflation since 2008 hasn’t generated a comparable...
