Tag Archives: Featured

15.04.2024 - The Producer and Import Price Index rose in March 2024 by 0.1% compared with the previous month, reaching 106.9 points (December 2020 = 100). In particular, petroleum products saw higher prices. Compared with March 2023, the price level of the whole range of domestic and imported products fell by 2.1%. These are the results from the Federal...

The city of San Antonio’s Status on Poverty Report was released recently, and the response was predictable. “I just want . . . some sort of an action plan.” Council should “better direct” taxpayer dollars “toward helping all San Antonians thrive.”If officials had a decent grasp of history, they’d know the likely outcomes from such efforts: more of the same.Poverty is the natural, initial state. Society wasn’t just born into affluence; it had to be created. As new...

The city of San Antonio’s Status on Poverty Report was released recently, and the response was predictable. “I just want . . . some sort of an action plan.” Council should “better direct” taxpayer dollars “toward helping all San Antonians thrive.”If officials had a decent grasp of history, they’d know the likely outcomes from such efforts: more of the same.Poverty is the natural, initial state. Society wasn’t just born into affluence; it had to be created. As new...

Interest rates surged last week on the back of a hotter-than-expected inflation report that wasn’t actually that bad (see below). Not that my – or your – opinion about these things matters all that much to the market. In the short run, all that matters is what the majority believes is the truth. What they believed last week was that inflation isn’t falling fast enough and the Fed will not be cutting rates anytime soon. That was enough to send the bond market into a...

The Anti-Concepts of Money The cash-value of promoting each of these anti-concepts is that they lead people to think that the central bank should impose a monetary policy. To make our lives better.  Our monetary policy is set by the Federal Reserve, which states that in pursuit of its mandate for price stability, it will engineer chronic 2% annual inflation. If we had nuclear reactor policy like this, power plant engineers would seek a slow, steady increase in core...

Last night, Brazilian fighter Renato Moicano went viral after his victory over JalinTurner at UFC 300, giving a shout-out to Ludwig von Mises himself.'I love America, I love the Constitution...I want to carry...guns. I love private property. Let If you something. If you care about your...country, read Ludwig von Mises and the six lessons of the Austrian economic school.The full clip is available here, with some colorful adult language included.Moicano's endorsement...

UBS already has to build up additional equity capital because it has become much larger as a result of the Credit Suisse takeover, Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter said. KEYSTONE/© KEYSTONE / MARTIAL TREZZINI In order to better protect taxpayers from the corporate failure of a systemically important bank in future, the Swiss government...

“Fast thinking” is a corrupting short-cut in mental processes which the late Daniel Kahneman identified by experiments in financial decision-making. Fast thinking plagues the market-place as it responds to the new threat of responses to Fed-led inflation. That threat had emerged even before the post-pandemic inflation starting in late 2022 cooled from its peak levels. The most recent surge in prices had materialized even though its symptoms in goods markets were...

Two books have recently been published on post-2007-2008 financial crisis history. The first is The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy by Christopher Leonard and it is my favorite of the two. Mr. Leonard describes the post-crisis financial environment extremely well in a way that is consistent with Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) without naming it. I expected this as the author is a journalist writing for a mass audience...

The words of Lewis Carroll are often cited in reference to the culture wars and the redefinition of words whose meaning used to be regarded as plain.“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”This is the fate that befell...