Writing in his newsletter last week, the great George Gilder quipped that the world’s central bankers are apparently “demoralized over their inability to drive the world into recession.” Gilder was re...
Tag: John Tamny
In a ‘Real World’ of Credit, Money Is Never Remotely ‘Free’
A recent opinion piece referenced a time in the not-too-distant past when money was “virtually free.” This was before Fed Chairman Powell supposedly brought “real world” to the cost of credit. Readers...
The Paul Volcker Narrative Imagines an Economy That Doesn’t Exist, and That Never Has
The Chinese government forbids foreign ownership of a broad range of Chinese businesses, including those that run websites. Despite this, despite endless rules meant to repel foreign capital migrating...
Lamar Jackson and the NFL’s Salary Cap Capably Indicate What ‘Inflation’ Isn’t
Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson took a big chance on himself last season. Rather than sign a long-term deal with the Ravens that would have been measured in the hundreds of millions, he dec...
Viv Groskop’s Thoroughly Excellent ‘The Anna Karenina Fix’
“To think I might have died without having read it.” Those were the words of the late, great William F. Buckley. He was referring to Moby Dick. Having read it after he’d turned 50, Buckley’s love of t...
Whatever Happens With ‘Inflation,’ Don’t Cheer/Jeer the Fed for the Outcome
It was reported last week that the January Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose .5%, which was up from the previous month. So while the number is falling, some think the .5% jump versus .1% the previous mo...
Will Guidara’s Inspiring and Excellent ‘Unreasonable Hospitality’
Back in the 1980s a music business anecdote that made the rounds was that arena rock band Van Halen had rather detailed requirements listed for each tour stop. This included a demand that there be no ...
A Reminder That Today’s ‘Inflation’ Quite Simply Isn’t Inflation
Super Bowl XXI took place on January 25, 1987 at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl. The matchup was between the New York Giants and the Denver Broncos. The Giants were heavily favored. I was lucky enough to attend...
Opposite What Economists Believe, Rising Wages Signal Easing Inflation
In the closing months of 2020 as the horrid lockdowns related to the coronavirus began to ease, the American people started to live again. With restaurants in some cities re-opened for – gasp – actual...
Regardless of the Federal Reserve’s Caution, Change Is Coming to Money and Banking
When the tragic invasion of Ukraine began last February, Russian people eager to avoid entrapment in a war that vandalized reason turned to dollars. Get it? Not only do dollars liquefy a fair amount o...
Milton Friedman Isn’t Required To Confirm That Monetarism Is Monetary Phrenology
Anna Fifield is a long-time reporter on North Korean matters for the Washington Post. In a book Fifield wrote about the dysfunctional country, she noted that the U.S. dollar is the currency of exchang...
What The Berenstain Bears Could Teach President Biden About How Jobs Are Created
“No need to worry, no need to fret. The thing for you may not have been invented yet.” – The Berenstain Bears. The Berenstain Bears is a much-beloved collection of children’s books offering lessons ab...
What You Think Inflation Is, It’s Not
Inflation remains the topic du jour. The problem is that much of what the pundit class imagines inflation to be quite simply isn’t inflation. Take a recent column by the Wall Street Journal’s James Ma...
We Have a Too-Much-Federal-Revenue Problem, Not a Looming ‘Debt Crisis’
“American public debt is at economically damaging levels and growing at an unsustainable rate. Congress should stabilize federal debt to reduce the possibility of a fiscal crisis.” Those are the words...
The Absurdity of the ‘Predatory Lending’ Narrative Seen Through the Prism of Retirement
“He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays for it.” The previous words are said to be those of Albert Einstein commenting on the genius of “compound interest,” but it’s difficult to find r...
Opposite Neel Kashkari’s Analysis, ‘Surge Pricing’ Has Nothing to Do with Inflation
“Our models seem ill equipped to handle a fundamentally different source of inflation, specifically, in this case, surge pricing inflation.” That’s what Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari wrote t...
Contra Its Critics, Sequoia Capital Is the Hero of the Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX Story
Business columnist Gene Marks is angry. He feels that venture capital firm Sequoia Capital did the other 99.99999% of us harm by investing in FTX. In his words, “super-smart people led millions of uns...
Interest Rate Price Controls Push Borrowers Into the Black Markets Do-Gooders Were Trying to Deliver Them From
Call it a statement of the obvious, but prices organize the market economy. As they go up and down, the movements exist as information for producers and providers of what we want more and less of. But...
Future Consumption Will Make the Prosperous Present Seem Deprived by Comparison
At the beginning of a book (Economics In One Lesson) that way-too-many economists have plainly never read, a non-economist by the name of Henry Hazlitt observed that economics is “stalked by fallacy.”...
Book Review: Nino Strachey’s ‘Young Bloomsbury’
“Those were the days.” Everyone has heard it, and most have said it. But were they? Particularly in the largely free parts of the world, today invariably exceeds yesterday. Looking back to 100 years a...
Damian Chazelle’s Brilliant ‘Babylon’ Should Be Required Viewing for Lina Khan
FTC Chair Lina Khan is hopelessly disconnected from reality. Conversely the movie industry is reality. It’s a constant reminder through producers, directors and actors of how incredibly difficult it i...
The Boundless Fatuity Informing the Simple-Minded Word ‘Recession’
In his brilliant 2014 book Creativity, Inc., Pixar founder Ed Catmull observed that “people need to be wrong as fast as they can.” In ten words Catmull exposed the mind-numbing stupidity of “recession...
Sam Bankman-Fried’s Many ‘Shocked’ Critics Forget That He Was Supposed to Fail
A recent opinion piece by the Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley led with the question/title “Where Was Biden’s SEC Sheriff on Sam Bankman-Fried?” At risk of speaking for Finley, isn’t it safe to sa...
On the Matter of TikTok, Republicans Are Perilously ‘Here to Help’
“I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Ronald Reagan famously referred to the previous words as the most terrifying ones in the English language. What’s sad in the here and now is that Republ...
With Cryptocurrencies as With the Internet and Cars, Collapse Is the Sector’s Life
On June 6, 2021 I published a column titled “We’ll Know Crypto Is For Real When Its Coins Start Collapsing.” More than most want to admit or realize, failure is growth. A “market” for crypto money def...
Repeat It Over and Over Again, Economic Growth Is All About Falling Prices
Economists fear falling prices, which means the pundits they interact with fear falling prices. The basis of the nailbiting within the economics profession has to do with their wholly confused belief ...
‘Recession’ Is Every Bit as Foolish As the GDP Calculation That Informs It
A recent Wall Street Journal headline lamented a scenario in which “Europeans Don’t Spend, Auguring a Recession.” Are journalists the problem, or sub-editors writing the headlines, or might it be that...
Yale Law School Drops Out of a Ranking System That It Never Needed
The “successful conduct of business demands qualities quite other than those necessary for passing examinations.” – Ludwig von Mises Policy writer and Duke Law School grad George Leef told me a story ...