Many decades later, Hugo Chávez’s government initiated an experiment in Venezuela—a country that possesses one of the largest proven oil reserves in the world—that pursued the opposite approach.
One thing is clear from this election: the Democratic Party mainly flies these days on its left wing.
This eye opening could be the single greatest contribution of President Donald Trump.
To the people who complain that the Democrats are worse, two bad choices are never an argument for one of the bad choices.
It can be tempting to chalk these dramatic political swings up to any one of the many stories that dominate the news cycle at the moment.
For the Nobel laureates, similarly to Keynes, boom-bust economic cycles are about the strength of the economy.
I have talked about domestic political violence on this podcast for a while and in interviews too. I have focused my attention not on sensational assassination events but on the increasingly common violent disputes between citizens and their government.
Some anticipate additional tightening if inflation remains elevated, while others warn that higher borrowing costs could further weaken housing and consumer spending.
Money solves the problem of the double coincidence of wants. A farmer sells his wheat for something widely accepted in exchange, then uses it to buy shoes.
Once public regulation and ownership crowd out private discipline, political overseers add conflicting social objectives that further distort incentives.
One pictures Scrooge McDuck swimming about in his safe full of gold coins, refusing to spend his riches, instead wallowing in greed.
As a market sits in a range of prices, the next question becomes: will the price break higher or lower? Surely in a fiat-money environment, such a market will do one thing or another, but not stay in the range forever.
In this case, the blame falls largely on Andrew Jackson and his destruction of the Second Bank of the United States.
Unlike our current monetary policy, the philosophy of a coin’s weight containing its stated monetary value in its metal composition was a mainstay of the early republic.
Power grows, concentrates and perpetuates itself, while liberty contracts. Every emergency supplies a justification for new authority. Every temporary restriction threatens to become permanent.
Attacks on ships passing through the Strait have increased. The flow of crude oil continues to be below the pre-war level.
