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Two days after Donald Trump became the first American since Grover Cleveland to win nonconsecutive presidential elections, the Federal Reserve announced a quarter percent cut in interest rates. Following this announcement, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell held a press conference where he said that he would not comply with any presidential request that he step down before his term ends in May of 2026.Powell claimed that the president lacks the legal...

The first Trump term was notable for countless terrible appointments Trump made. This was true in terms of both politics and policy. On the political end, Trump appointed people who routinely sought to undermine him politically. Many of Trump’s own appointees would go on to campaign against Trump in 2020 and 2024. Trump’s more clueless followers assured us that this was all, somehow, 4-D chess. Of course, it wasn’t. The 4-D chess trope has always been, as the kids...

Overview: The dollar continues to ride high. It is up 0.20%-0.50% today against the G10 currencies. Most pairs have extended last week's moves. The Dollar Index, which was near 100 in late September is approaching 106.00. Emerging market currencies are all weaker, as well. The dollar is being helped by higher US yields. After yesterday's holiday, the US 10-year yield is up five basis points to near 4.36%. The two-year yield also is five basis points higher to almost...

Europe was slowly, painfully recovering from WWII. Liberalism—which had seemingly won the day against fascism in the West—was seeking to revitalize itself. It had tried before the war—through the Walter Lippmann colloquium—to moderate itself back into relevance. Many of the figures from the colloquium were intent to try again, with lessons learned from the war. One attendee—Ludwig von Mises—had no intentions of moderating, and was even more convinced that such a road...

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....

Investor exuberance has rarely been so optimistic. In a recent post, we discussed investor expectations of returns over the next year, according to the Conference Board’s Sentiment Index. To wit: “Consumer confidence in higher stock prices in the next year remains at the highest since 2018, following the 2017 “Trump” tax cuts.“ (Note: this survey was completed before the Presidential Election.) We also discussed households’ allocations to equities, which,...

Just ignore the economists, says a recent article in The Atlantic. Well, what about listening to economists concerning the devastating effects of price controls? If we ignore economists, then it would be easy to ignore market interventionists’ uncontrollable and intoxicating need to impose price floors and ceilings in marketplaces and the effects of these controls on society at large. What economists know that The Atlantic author does not know is that there are...

Switzerland is a hub for research, high-skilled workers, and advanced manufacturing, especially in areas like biotech, robotics, and engineering. Keystone / Salvatore Di Nolfi Listen to the article Listening the article...

The images coming out of Latin America are hard to ignore. Tens of thousands of gang members in Bukele’s El Salvador lined up, shoulder-to-shoulder, waiting to be placed in prison, their rights suspended as a result of a crackdown on gang activity. Hundreds of government workers for AFIP—Argentina’s version of the IRS—standing in a multi-level gallery, papers drifting down to the bottom floor as they learn the agency has been shuttered. While the two presidents have...

Assumptions that some economists are employing in their theories appear to be detached from the real world. For example, in order to explain the economic crisis in Japan, Paul Krugman employed a theory based on the assumptions that people are identical and live forever. Whilst admitting that these assumptions are not realistic, Krugman nonetheless is of the view that somehow his theory could be useful in offering solutions to the economic crisis in Japan. Thus,...