Tag Archives: newsletter

Congress enjoys exorbitant political privilege in the form of cheap deficit spending—but it may soon come to an end. Original Article: “Rising Interest Rates May Blow Up the Federal Budget” In fiscal year 2020, at the height of covid stimulus mania, Congress managed to spend nearly twice what the federal government raised in taxes. Yet in 2021, with Treasury debt piled sky high and spilling over $30 trillion, Congress was able to service this gargantuan...

Blossoming cooperative ideas: a common economy, consumer protection and equality of the sexes. Dora Hauth-Trachsler/Schweizersiches Sozialarchiv The word “cooperative” is everywhere in Swiss daily life. What’s often forgotten is that cooperatives were once at the forefront of a worldwide movement that advocated for consumer rights, affordable rents – and world peace. In his opening speech at the tenth international congress of the International Cooperative Alliance...

Overview:  The US dollar is bid against most currencies today, encouraged not just by good news in the US and poor news out of China, where Covid is flaring up and new social restrictions are fared, while Macau has been lockdown for a week. The energy crisis in Europe is fanning fears of a recession before the ECB lift rates above zero. Japanese markets bucked the global move and advanced, which it often does after the government wins an upper house election. The...

In the recent Wall Street Journal article “Inflation Surge Earns Monetarism Another Look,” Greg Ip writes that a recent surge in inflation is not likely to bring authorities to reembrace monetarism. According to Ip, money supply had a poor record of predicting US inflation because of conceptual and definitional problems that haven’t gone away. The head of the monetarist school, the late Milton Friedman, held that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary...

Systemic debt and deficit spending are intrinsic features of today’s economic system. Unlike classical economics, where markets play the leading role and governments the supporting one, the existing economic model, driven by Keynesian theory, has inverted the roles. Keynesian economics, like other statist economic theories, is distrustful of (free) markets, thus making the state, an inherently bureaucratic and coercive institution, the captain of economic and social...

People wait to receive humanitarian aid in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, on May 28, 2022. Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. Despite record public donations for Ukraine, four months since the start of the invasion by Russia, Swiss aid agencies have only been able to spend a small amount of the funds on humanitarian work. An investigationExternal link by the SonntagsZeitung newspaper published on July 10 has revealed that Swiss Solidarity, the Swiss Red...

The employment report released last Friday was better than expected but the response by bulls and bears alike was exactly as expected. Both found things in the report to support their preconceived notions about the state of the economy. I do think the bulls had the better case on this particular report but there have been plenty of others recently to support the ursine side of the aisle too. My take is that everything about the economy right now, and really since...

High political drama in recent days included the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Abe and the resignation of UK Prime Minister Johnson. Yet, the capital markets in general, and the currency market in particular, were not roiled. This is because investors have their sights elsewhere.  The dollar surged. It is partly a function of bad news elsewhere. Japan's easy monetary policy stance sticks out like a sore thumb, and the May data showed the economic...

The overturning of Roe v. Wade is a historic decision, upholding the highest principle of a republic. A republic is born through freedom of association in the same manner as individuals band together to form a family, families band together to make a community, and communities band together to make a society. In an ideal situation of law-based governance, the law givers and the law abiders must be the same, as it is only then that voluntary subservience to the law...

The Federal Reserve was supposed to prevent recessions that people blamed on the lack of central banking. Not surprisingly, the post-Fed recessions have been worse. Original Article: “How Bad Were Recessions before the Fed? Not as Bad as They Are Now” With a recession looming over the average American, the group to blame is pretty obvious, this group being the central bankers at the Federal Reserve, who inflate the supply of currency in the system, that currency...