Tag Archives: Featured

Overview: The dollar is narrowly mixed against the G10 and emerging market currencies today. The euro is little changed, holding on to last week's gains, after the surprising French election results, where the focus shifts finding a prime minister that can carry a majority of the new and closely divided National Assembly. Despite firm underlying wage data, the Japanese yen has given back its initial gains, and the dollar is pushing back above JPY161 in the European...

This is a transcript from Mark Thornton’s Podcast, “Minor Issues,” July 6.Well, I know that many of my listeners will have a certain number of regrets about the July 4th holiday. And some of them may not even celebrate it at all. I certainly share many of those regrets. And concerns about the future of our country.We have an extremely bad government. That has increased in size and power enormously. We have a national debt which has exploded in size with an annual...

Sound money advocate and Conservative Party MP for Wycombe Steve Baker lost his seat in the general election that took place on 4th July–curious timing for a sitting Prime Minister to have called an election his party was always near-certain to lose. As Americans were celebrating Independence Day, the remnant Brits opposed to the government meddling in every aspect of their lives were bracing for a prime minister who describes himself as a socialist–and thinks that...

Modern monetary theory (MMT) is not convincing to most trained economists of various schools of thought. This causes many to balk at MMT and mock it, some of which is warranted as a reductio ad absurdum, especially given some of MMT’s more outlandish claims. In fact, my own thesis was an Austrian critique of MMT.But there is also a fair amount of hypocrisy in the non-Austrian (e.g., mainstream, Keynesian, monetarist) critiques of MMT by mainstream economists. The...

[This talk was delivered at the Future of Freedom Foundation‘s conference on “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties,” on June 6, 2008, in Reston, Virginia.]The US central bank, called the Federal Reserve, was created in 1913. No one promoted this institution with the slogan that it would make wars more likely and guarantee that nearly half a million Americans will die in battle in foreign lands, along with millions of foreign soldiers and...

Four drivers are shaping the investment climate. First, ahead of the run-off elections in France, the market feels more comfortable that Le Pen will not secure a parliamentary majority. The French premium over Germany narrowed to 65 bp, falling by about 14 bp last week, and arguable a supportive factor for the euro. Second, the British election was largely a foregone conclusion, and Labour did secure majority. It ought not be construed as a shift to the left as...

The Home BuyersAs reported by ZeroHedge recently, the NAR U.S. Pending Home Sales Index dropped 2.1 percent MoM in May, down 6.6 percent YoY.To put these numbers into perspective, the current index is at 70.8, or 70.8 percent of the contract activity in the base year 2001. This is lower than any point during the 2008 financial crisis; even lower than 2020, when lockdowns brought markets to a screeching halt. This is the lowest level of contract activity in my...

Since the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society, the US federal budget has shifted from providing pubic goods to distributing transfers (in the form of both spending and lending) to favored groups, a continually metastasizing shift that has now created a federal budgetary and debt crisis. It has also allowed politicians to perfect the fine art of buying votes by awarding federal transfers to select voter groups as a means to winning elections.What are Public...

What is the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order....

Many academic fields are devoted to reconstructing reality, to make reality fit their socialist ideals better. Those who wish to reconstruct reality argue, for example, that there is no reason why some animals should be regarded as “wild.” They argue that we should seek “new ways to think and act in a world dominated everywhere by human power and activity” and that there is no reason to exclude the animal world from that enterprise. Instead, “we have a responsibility...