School children learn that there are three branches of government. In actual practice, there is a fourth branch, the permanent bureaucracy which includes legions of civilian and military agents, officers, and administrators committed to protecting their own interests.
Anti-market activists in Argentina try to blame the country's economic woes on markets, but the populist movement of Peronism is what has doomed the country to endless cycles of economic and monetary crises.
The fact that central bank policies become ineffective in reviving the economy is not due to the liquidity trap, but because of the decline in the pool of real savings. This decline emerges due to loose monetary and fiscal policies.
When operating in an easy money regime, finding investments capable of providing reasonable returns becomes difficult to near impossible. Low risk vehicles are bid down to near-zero returns, pushing investors into ever riskier vehicles to generate enough return to cover objectives.
Transitioning to a cashless society is a natural fit for the authoritarian regime in Beijing — and one that has long been sold as “benign” by the more “liberal” globalist elite.
Government police, analysts, and lab workers have been repeatedly shown using faulty technology, forging documents, and falsifying lab results to arrest, prosecute, and convict innocent citizens.
The Fed overestimated the robustness of the economy, underestimated the level of addiction of the markets to cheap money, and it was way too quick to proclaim a “full recovery” from the crisis.
Thanks to huge amounts of fiscal and monetary stimulus, China is in the midst of a very large housing bubble, with predictable results for housing affordability.
The government may claim that it needs the funds to provide essential social services: are the poor to be left to starve? But these assertions do not justify its policy of forcible seizure.
One of the great problems involved in setting a standard of poverty is the ever-changing concept of "adequate" nutrition. Recently a nutrition survey concluded that "only one person in a thousand escapes malnutrition!"
