How can a small rise in bond yields scare policymakers so much? Ned Davis Research estimates that a 2% yield in the US 10-year bond could lead the Nasdaq to fall 20%, and with it the entire stock market globally. A 2% yield can cause such disruption? How did we get to such a situation? Central banks have artificially depressed sovereign bond yields for years. Now, a small rise in yields can cause a massive market slump that evolves into a financial crisis....
Read More »It’s Time for the US to Withdraw from Korea
Pulling troops out of South Korea is an important step in changing the conversation on American foreign policy, which is swamped in platitudes of promoting missionary enterprises abroad and finding new bogeymen to confront. Original Article: “It’s Time for the US to Withdraw from Korea” America’s military footprint abroad is unmatched in human history. With more than eight hundred military bases in over seventy countries across the globe, the US is in an ideal...
Read More »Why a Green New Deal Is More Expensive Than Joe Biden Realizes
Wind and solar power can work well when placed in an ideal location. Much of the time, however, these projects require a lot of fossil fuel to produce, but then never deliver the promised “zero-carbon” energy. Original Article: “Why a Green New Deal Is More Expensive Than Joe Biden Realizes” One of President Biden’s first executive actions was to declare January 27 “Climate Day.” This ad hoc holiday provided an opportunity for his administration to celebrate the...
Read More »Why Is Economic Journalism So Bad?
Niall Ferguson holds a PhD in philosophy from Oxford, taught history at Harvard and NYU, and wrote perhaps the definitive biography of Henry Kissinger. So, naturally, Bloomberg hired him to write on economics. His most recent column for Bloomberg is a strained mix of the Scot’s views on inflation, tempered slightly by a welcome skepticism toward Jerome Powell’s dismissal of the threat. Ferguson is still gun-shy from an exchange with Paul Krugman back in 2010 over...
Read More »What the Shipping Container Shortage Reveals about US-China Trade
Despite the record unemployment rate, widespread hardship to businesses, strains on the healthcare system, political turmoil, and general disruption to daily life in 2020, US consumers have managed to ramp up their habit of buying things. Demand for physical goods replaced some of the previous demand for in-person service-related experiences and much of that demand was met with a surge of imports from China as domestic production slowed down due to lockdown measures....
Read More »In Some Countries, Lockdowns May Be the “New Normal”
While some countries in Europe are showing signs of lifting all restrictions soon, Ireland’s so-called leaders are telling citizens it cannot be guaranteed that they’ll even be able to holiday in their own country this summer. Original Article: Like many mainstream economists who make predictions that inform and shape government policy, medical experts make predictions which can determine how a government addresses a perceived problem. A good example here is...
Read More »Moral Courage and the Austrian School
When economic crises hit, most pundits and intellectuals never see it coming. That is because they have never learned the lesson that Bastiat sought to teach, namely that we need to look beneath the surface, to the unseen dimensions of human action, in order to see the full economic reality. It is not enough just to stand back and look at points on a chart going up and down, smiling when things go up and frowning when things go down. That is the nihilism of an...
Read More »What Really Happened With the Texas Power Grid
Since the deep freeze in February caused millions of Texas homes to lose their power, partisans have been fighting over the blame. The governor blamed wind turbines and the green agenda, whereas Paul Krugman said the fault was with natural gas. Bob shows the numbers; natural gas was to blame only in the sense that nobody expected wind to be useful during a winter crisis. Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest: Bob’s article at Mises.org, which gives...
Read More »In Some Countries, Lockdowns May Be the “New Normal”
Like many mainstream economists who make predictions that inform and shape government policy, medical experts make predictions which can determine how a government addresses a perceived problem. A good example here is Professor Neil Ferguson, who led the flawed Imperial College covid-19 study which played a major role in the lockdowns implemented throughout Europe, and even in the US and Canada. The model used by Imperial offered many predications, including the...
Read More »Per Bylund and Mark Packard: Radically Reshaping Business Thinking via Subjective Value
In a recently published paper titled “Subjective Value In Entrepreneurship,” Professors Bylund and Packard apply the principle of subjective value to generate significant new avenues of thinking for entrepreneurial businesses to pursue. Watch the “Value Generation Business Model” video at Mises.org/E4B_108_Video. value-generation-business-model:7?r=69GquufdquhHCfynHaaJizQfhSz8R87h [embedded content] Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights Re-think value....
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