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What Investors Do, And Policymakers Need To Do When The Price Of Gold Falls
The big run-up in the price of gold that has been a constant in this millennium finally broke a bit in 2013. From the peak of some $1850 per ounce (achieved in 2011), gold closed this past year around...
View ArticleBig-Government Stirrings In Texas, The Most Important Place In The World
Earlier this month the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) convened a gathering of legislators, wonks, and hangers-on at the state capital to take stock of the current fiscal climate. The TPPF, as...
View ArticleBernanke Gave Us Plenty Of Inflation — And Stagflation
As Ben Bernanke departs his chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, we might wish to say that despite his outsized monetary policy, inflation never came. The revealing statistic is the consumer price...
View ArticleThe Left Has Been Wishing Non-Work On The Poor For 200 Years
Incredible legerdemain has been coming out of the Barack Obama policy shops. Taking the cake is the administration’s response to the Congressional Budget Office report showing that Obamacare will...
View ArticleA Jealous Government Burdened Us With the Fed
The musty old document that supposedly governs this country, the Constitution of the United States put into practice way back in 1789, makes no provision for the governmental institution that has...
View ArticleThe Weak Dollar Is Putin’s Enabler
Lucky for Vladimir Putin that as he makes his push into Ukrainian territories, the price of oil is just about $100 per barrel. A price so high—five times the average of the 1990s, when the Russian...
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Thomas Piketty Is A Darwinian Shill
The new economics book everyone is talking about is Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. Piketty made his name a few years ago by coining the term the “top 1%.” Now in this volume of 700...
View ArticleKrugman Throws Stones From A Glass House
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote the following last month: “Recently the Federal Reserve released transcripts of its monetary policy meetings during the fateful year of 2008….What’s really...
View ArticleAs The Obama Era Ages, Scapegoating Mounts
The greatest editorialist of our age, Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal, is at it again. Over the weekend, Rago profiled two investors in Philadelphia who are resisting government pressure to...
View ArticleThe Gold Standard Had Nothing To Do With Panics And Busts
One of the main reasons that detractors of the gold standard contend it is a “barbarous relic” (in John Maynard Keynes’s phrase) is that it was implicated in so many financial panics and economic busts...
View Article“Capital’s” Corpse Is Getting Unrecognizable
A few weeks ago, a financial blogger who shall go unnamed (because he acted like a dunderhead) wrote that there was not one scrap of conservative criticism of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st...
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We Need A National Literature Lampooning Government
The modern market economy has never lacked for its literary expositors. From the time the industrial revolution (a term coined in the 1820s in France) first gained notice as a major and permanent...
View ArticleThe Battle For Reagan’s Soul, 2014 Version
In 1980, that terrible year of stagflation, when Ronald Reagan was gaining the Republican nomination for president, dueling editorials appeared in the Wall Street Journal about “The Battle for Reagan’s...
View ArticleGet Real, Monetary Policy
Last week, the House Financial Services Committee held hearings on Federal Reserve reform. Maybe the Fed could explicitly follow monetary policy rules, or become subject to conventional audits, or be...
View ArticleHouston And GE: Opposite Fates From The Fiat Dollar
Houston, Texas sure is entering a golden era. It seems that everyone is moving to the town (the nation’s fourth biggest) these days. The largest construction project in the nation is just north of the...
View ArticleOn The Border, The GOP Is Outraged At The Wrong Thing
The immigration crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border these days is an odd one. Adherents of the party of free-enterprise, the Republicans, are opposed to the migration of free labor across the border,...
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The GOP Could Reform Its Way To Keynesianism
“Supply-side economics needs a 21st-century update,” went a post at the American Enterprise Institute’s blog the other day, challenging the assurance from the Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell that no, it...
View ArticleTransacting in Gold Can Shaft The IRS
In 2011, the state of Utah passed a law banning taxes on the use of gold and silver coins as currency and permitting residents to remit state taxes in these coins. Big deal, you might say. That’s...
View ArticleThe Obama-Reagan Comparison Does O. No Favors
With the stock market cruising at all-time highs and the unemployment rate sitting at quaint levels, a fashionable new argument is making the rounds. Barack Obama is better at economic recovery than...
View ArticleGreenspan Lets His Hair Down; Talks Up Gold
Former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan published a mighty interesting article in Foreign Affairs last week. He said that China could be thinking of increasing its gold stocks in a big way....
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