Tag Archives: Featured

Overview: Bonds and stocks are mostly heavier today and the dollar has turned mixed. Oil prices are consolidating after soaring to new highs since late last year on the longer than expected extension of Saudi Arabia's extra cut of one million barrels a day. Since July, it has been extending it by one month at a time. Yesterday, it extended it through Q4. Russia, who had previously indicated intentions on reducing its exports by 500k barrels, announced it was...

Much of government-owned transportation destroys rather than adds to wealth. The lack of a sound system of economic calculation is to blame. Original Article: "The Problem with Public Transit" [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter

It’s likely that many readers of The Austrian support the free market and also support “traditional” social values, but in Patrick Deneen’s opinion, this is an unstable amalgam. Deneen, a political theorist who teaches at Notre Dame, thinks that the market undermines tradition and that those of us who resist the “woke” Left and want to preserve tradition ought to abandon what he sees as an uncritical devotion to the market. Deneen says that classical and medieval...

Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, two of the best-known Austrian school economists in the twentieth century, may have followed the same school of thought, but they greatly differed in their work. In consideration of human action, the two men differed in their methodology: Mises advocated for a pure use of reason through praxeology, and Hayek, alternatively, defended the compositive method. In regard to the market process and entrepreneurship, Mises’s and Hayek’s views...

Despite its origin in Marxist-syndicalist thought, “fascism” has long been used as a derogatory label for practically anyone on the right wing of the political spectrum. Sometimes the label is warranted, but other times it is used against those who have virtually nothing in common with fascists, such as libertarian capitalists. Progressives are quick to label any kind of economic deregulation and reduction in federal overreach as “fascist.” Want to have a free...

Many conservatives, in trying to steer the USA away from "wokeism," fail to understand that their “national greatness” schemes are just as harmful. Original Article: ""National Greatness" Is Not the Appropriate Response to "Wokeism"" [embedded content] Tags: Featured,newsletter

Technology is the main reason why so many of us are still alive to complain about technology. —Garry Kasparov If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion. —Ray Kurzweil While world leaders try to decide whether their interests are best served by World War III or some other imposed atrocity, various forces have states targeted for extinction. Chief among these forces is the exponential nature of evolution and...

Overview:  Disappointing data in Asia and Europe has sent the greenback broadly higher. The strong gains posted before the weekend were mostly consolidated yesterday when the US and Canadian markets were on holiday. The rally resumed today. The Antipodeans and Scandis have been hit the hardest (-0.7% to -1.25%) but all the G10 currencies are down. The Swiss franc and yen are off the least (-0.35%-0.45%), and the euro and sterling have taken out their recent lows....

The rioting in France is not due to racism nor is it the logical end of immigration. Instead, it is rooted in France's minimum wage and other labor restrictions that lead to unemployment and resentment. Original Article: "France's Unrest Has Deep Roots. Proposed Immigration Restrictions Will Make Things Worse" [embedded content]...

Homeless foreign nationals (i.e., "illegal aliens") began arriving last week at a makeshift shelter in a Staten Island neighborhood. The arrivals come after New York City Mayor Eric Adams decided that a shuttered Catholic school on Staten Island would be used to house some of the more than 100,000 migrants who have arrived in New York City since the spring of 2022.  Staten Islanders, however, were given no veto and no role in determining the location of the shelter...