04.06.2024 - The consumer price index (CPI) increased by 0.3% in May 2024 compared with the previous month, reaching 107.7 points (December 2020 = 100). Inflation was +1.4% compared with the same month of the previous year. These are the results of the Federal Statistical Office (FSO).The 0.3% increase compared with the previous month is due to several factors...
Read More »Yellen Wants Price Inflation to Rise So the Feds Can Keep Spending
The long-term forecast for higher interest rates, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, makes it more difficult to control US borrowing needs, which emphasizes the significance of raising revenue in the forthcoming budget talks with Republican lawmakers. There is only one problem. She is wrong.According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) baseline, which does not assume a single year of recession and already counts with record tax revenues, the 2025...
Read More »Scott Galloway’s TED Talk Reveals a Basic Ignorance of Economics
Scott Galloway, a professor in marketing from New York University and a frequent guest on networks like the execrable CNBC, gave a recent TED talk titled How the US Is Destroying Young People’s Future.With a title like that, you might expect a hard-hitting indictment of the United States regime’s fiscal profligacy, the welfare- and war-state leviathans, and the Federal Reserve’s insistence on robbing Americans by at least 2 percent per year while creating an endless...
Read More »Election Results Lift India But Weigh on Mexico
Overview: The dollar has returned from the weekend with a better bid tone. It is firmer against all the G10 currencies but the yen, Swiss franc, and Swedish krona, which are marginally firmer. The market seems reluctant to extend the euro or Canadian dollar upticks ahead of the central bank meetings this week, though, ironically, sterling’s 0.25% decline leads the major currencies. Election news is a key driver today. A dramatic victory for the Morena party in...
Read More »Tucker Carlson’s Guests Keep Bringing up the Mises Institute
Tucker Carlson is apparently warming up to Austrian economics and the work of the Mises Institute. In 2019, when he was still on Fox News, he made a quick dig at Austrian economics, and he was critical of “libertarian economics” as recently as December of last year.But Austrian economics and the Mises Institute have come up in his interviews with three different guests over the past few months, and instead of being critical or dismissive, Carlson was open to the...
Read More »Milei’s Challenge to False Economists
In 1972, members of the newly created Libertarian Party wanted Murray Rothbard to be their candidate in the coming presidential run. During an interview, when asked about this possibility, Rothbard first had a long laugh. After laughing, he stated that he did not think that it was even the time to create a libertarian party, simply because there were not enough libertarians, but that if there was eventually a strong libertarian party, several things could be...
Read More »Does Increasing the Money Supply also Increase Economic Growth?
Many economic commentators believe increasing the quantity of money can revive an economy. This is based on the view that with more money in their pockets, people will spend more and others follow suit, as they hold that money is a mere means of payments.Money, however, is not the means of payments but rather a medium of exchange. It only enables one producer to exchange his product for the product of another producer. According to Murray Rothbard, “Money, per se,...
Read More »June 2024 Monthly
There are two forces that shape the investment climate: politics and economics, and they are both at the fore in the coming weeks.Among the highlights will be the European Central Bank meeting that will mostly likely begin its easing cycle. The Bank of Canada is a close call. If it does not cut rates in June, it will probably do so in July. The Swiss National Bank may deliver its second hike in the cycle, while the Bank of England will likely continue to prepare the...
Read More »Would Ending the Fed Cause a Depression?
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....
Read More »The Trends of the Trade
Trade school enrollment is on the rise. Many trade schools have seen as much as a 19.3 percent rise in enrollment over the last several years. This is good news given the labor shortages in areas like construction and auto mechanics.Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when I was in high school, it was unthinkable to not go to college. In my working-class neighborhood, a college education was viewed as a way out of poverty. Jobs in construction, welding, and the...
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