Tag Archives: Featured

The famous quote, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” is usually attributed to Albert Einstein. While intended as a parable for quantum insanity, such a quote could equally be a parable for inflation policy. With the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve seeking to maintain target rates of 2 percent, the UK inflation rate has only fallen to 10.7 percent from 11.1 percent. Considering inflation is still...

Overview:  Yesterday's greenback gains have been mostly reversed today. New efforts by China in its property market and anticipation of more stimulus helped rekindle the animal spirits today. Asia and Europe shrugged off yesterday's losses on Wall Street and the rally in bonds continued. The 8-12 bp decline in European benchmark 10-year yields comes even though the final composite PMI was better than expected fanning hopes of a short and shallow economic downturn....

Keystone / Ennio Leanza A total of 50,015 companies set up in Switzerland last year thanks to a late surge in the last quarter. The number of new firms entering the marketplace has remained stable. The total corresponds to a drop of 1% compared to 2021 and an increase of 7% compared to 2020, according to data from commercial registers compiled by Help.ch published on Tuesday. The performance in 2022 is 27% higher than ten years ago, when 39,371 companies were...

[From the Austrian Economics Newsletter, Spring 1987] The Austrian School of economics did not develop out of thin air. It built upon the work of a number of other economists and philosophers going back as far as Aristotle. Among the precursors of the Austrian School were a number of Spanish and Italian scholastic economists. Several early Italian economists influenced the development of continental European economic thought in the centuries before Carl Menger. Gian...

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen blog posts or articles or Tweets about negative consumer sentiment over the last year. These articles rightly point out that the University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey is sitting near (or at a few months ago) 50 year lows. This fact is taken as a negative for the economy and therefore stocks. The only problem is that sentiment today tells you only how people view things today – and investing is about the future. If...

Money supply growth fell again in November, and this time it turned negative for the first time in 33 years. November’s drop continues a steep downward trend from the unprecedented highs experienced during much of the past two years. During the thirteen months between April 2020 and April 2021, money supply growth in the United States often climbed above 35 percent year over year, well above even the “high” levels experienced from 2009 to 2013. Since then, the money...

Overview: Market participants have returned from the New Year celebrations apparently with robust risk appetites. Equities and bonds are rallying, and the dollar has surged higher. The markets seem to be looking past the surge in China’s Covid cases and anticipates a recovery, helping Chinese equities lead Asia Pacific bourses higher, where Japanese markets are still on holiday. Europe’s Stoxx 600 is 1.6% higher in late morning turnover. US equity futures are also...

If the consensus of experts misunderstand money, credit and prosperity, how are we going to advance? Describing all the ways experts got it wrong is a thriving cottage industry. Expertise is itself contentious, as conventional expertise legitimized by credentials, prestigious institutional positions, scholarship, prizes, etc. can be wielded to promote the interests of the expert or whomever is funding the expert. Another segment of experts are self-proclaimed,...

Interview with Jeff Deist, President Mises Institute, Auburn, USA Division, friction and polarization have been on the rise in the West for at least a decade, but the escalation we saw during the “covid years” was especially worrying. Over the last year, this “worry” has become a truly pressing concern, even a real emergency one might argue, as inflationary pressures and an actual war were added to the mix of political and social tensions. Going into 2023, there are...

I first became aware of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) after moving to Montana and was immediately intrigued by their work. The more I dug into PERC’s research, the more I realized they aligned with my worldview of free market conservation. The CEO of PERC, Brian Yablonski, graciously met with me to discuss PERC’s initiatives. Even after two hours, we had barely touched the surface of PERC’s free-market, conservation initiatives. Brian caught my...