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What happens when war shuts down the Strait of Hormuz? Mark looks at the economics and causes of a growing list of problems with the "chokepoints" of international trade: the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, and Baltimore harbor. Will these chokepoints become scapegoats for the Federal Reserve, and could war closing the Strait of Hormuz become a genuine world crisis?Be sure to follow Minor Issues at Mises.org/MinorIssues.Get your free copy of Dr. Guido...

Who’s Afraid of Gender?by Judith ButlerFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024; 308 pp.Judith Butler is a well-known feminist theorist, and one approaches her latest book with interest, all the more so because of its puzzling title. By “gender,” Butler means the view that the roles of men and women in society are not determined by biology but vary in different cultures and times and, further, that there are some people who do not fit within the “binary” categories of men and...

Day-to-day we don’t hear much about the commercial office property crash. As The Fed’s Michael Barr said at an event hosted by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition in Washington, “This is the kind of thing where it’s likely to be a very slow-moving train as the financial sector and commercial real estate market move forward,” he said, adding that refinancing deals will play out in the next few years. “It’ll take some time.”Barr, the vice chair for...

“Genocide Joe” and the foreign agents knowns as the “American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose Israel-First focus makes them a fifth column; Trump with Jared Kushner and his better-half: These are America’s 2024 election options.The Biden-AIPAC bloc has begun whispering sweet nothings in the ears of Israel’s Benny Gantz (National Unity Party), ostensible rival of Bibi Netanyahu (Likud). The AIPAC-run Biden bloc would like you to believe that a chasm in...

Between the ongoing war in Gaza and Houthi attacks on Western shipping in the Red Sea, the media has had plenty of gruesome foreign policy fodder for the content mill. However, this coverage has come at the expense of the ongoing grinding conflict in Ukraine, which has quickly gone from a euphoric cause célèbre to a now embarrassing catastrophe that is best shoved in the closet and forgotten like all the rest of America’s decades of costly foreign...

The world is full of scraps of paper today.- Benjamin Anderson, economist, Chase Manhattan Bank (1920 - 1939)April 1933 found America mired in a crushing economic depression, and newly elected president Franklin DeLano Roosevelt -- who had declared the previous month he had a legal power derived from the Trading with the Enemy Act to assume control of our monetary system -- responded by taking America off the gold standard. That the Act, an unexploded legislative...

Today, states across the country are beginning to actively embrace prosound money legislation, inviting a critical examination of how America abandoned the gold standard of money and racked up $34.5 trillion in debt. To understand how we got here, it’s important to understand the policy that initiated our monetary decline.More than ninety years ago today, April 5, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102, forever reshaping America’s monetary...

Overview: The focus is squarely on the US employment report. At the risk of oversimplifying, given the position adjustment in the past 48 hours, a solid report can see the greenback recover, while a disappointing report will likely see it deepen the correction of the rally that began with the February jobs report. The dollar recovered in the North American afternoon yesterday and many observers attributed it to the bevy of Fed comments. Yet, the interest rate market...

Nick Gillespie, editor-at-large for Reason, recently got into a friendly dispute with Bob over whether American libertarians were being too pessimistic. He joins Bob to make the case for optimism, while Bob demurs.Human Action Podcast listeners can get a free copy of Dr. Guido Hülsmann's How Inflation Destroys Civilization: Mises.org/HAPodFree [embedded content]...

In The Price of Time, Edward Chancellor has given us a colorful and provocative review of the history, theory, and the profound effects of interest rates, the price that links the present and the future, which he argues is “the most important price of all.” The history runs from Hammurabi’s Code which in 1750 BC was “largely concerned with the regulation of interest,” and from the first debt cancellation, which was proclaimed by a ruler in ancient Mesopotamia, all...