Category Archives

Archive of posts published in the category: Economy

Peter Has Options

When you rob Peter to pay Paul you can always count on Paul’s approval, but you cannot count on Peter to remain cooperative. Peter has options.

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The Covid Market

When the vast amount of money from the Fed is dropped on the economy it does not matter where it is directed, much of it will find its way to the service providers and producers where the money will be spent. When trillions of dollars are pulled from thin air and dropped on the economy it is inevitable that much of it will find its way into the stock market.

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The True Cost of Cheap Money

From The City Journal
“Ultralow rates ease the pressure on enterprises to adopt productivity-enhancing innovations, restructure inefficient operations, and dispose of unproductive assets. That’s a major reason that productivity growth has been so poor. Ultralow rates also distort capital allocation.”

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Trump Steals The Union Vote

From Peggy Noonan at The Wall Street Journal, Trump Tries to Build a ‘Different Party’: The lengthy, public and early meeting with the union leaders was, among other things, first-class, primo political pocket-picking. The Trump White House was showing the Democratic

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Stagnant Inertia

Six years from the Great Recession and the excuses for the tepid recovery are becoming worn.  This time is different- well it always is.  There may be an issue with structural changes that affect employment and wages, but this is

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The Secret to Berkshire’s Success

By Henry Oliner For the third consecutive year I attended the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in Omaha.  It has become a tradition for a group of us attending to meet the first night at Drovers Steakhouse where they marinate the

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Historical Regression

Any society that entails the strengthening of the state apparatus by giving it unchecked control over the economy, and re-unites the polity and the economy, is in historical regression. In it there is no more future for the public, or

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Folly and Presumption

The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted to no council

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Why Inequality is Getting Worse

From George Will at National Review, A Philosopher Takes On the Left’s Obsession with Income Inequality First, the entitlement state exists primarily to transfer wealth regressively, from the working-age population to the retired elderly who, after a lifetime of accumulation,

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A Change in Consumer Patterns

from the New York Times, Stores Suffer From a Shift of Behavior in Buyers by Hiroko Tabuchi excerpts: Data released by the Commerce Department shows that American consumers are putting what little extra money they do have to spend each

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The New Migration

from Joel Kotkin in New Geography, The Changing Geography of Racial Opportunity: Excerpt: Perhaps the greatest irony in our findings is the location of many of the best cities for minorities: the South. This is particularly true for African-Americans who

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Economic Growth and the Ruling Class

In our present “age of elites,” as author Chrystia Freeland has dubbed it, this ideological shift among the rich, particularly the new rich, is critical to understanding the new class order. Some of the nation’s wealthiest regions, many of which

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Uber and DUIs

In LA Weekly Dennis Romero writes IS UBER REDUCING DUIS IN L.A? In a vast, 4,000-square-mile county, it’s hard for many folks to get around without a car. And that has meant that DUIs have become a much-feared epidemic. But

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Authoritarian Posers of Capitalism

Joel Kotkin writes Choosing Fortune Over Freedom Excerpts: This is not surprising, given the rapid progress that country has made in recent years. China has expanded its share of global gross domestic product from 2 percent in 1995 to 12 percent in

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Raising the Price of Exit

from Scott Grannis from Calafia Beach Pundit, Obama’s attempt to block tax inversion is a mistake; As the WSJ article notes, it’s still questionable whether the administration has the authority to block inversions via executive order. But in the meantime,

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we have much more in common with one another than we dare to realize.

Economist Mark Perry writes in his blog Carpe Diem, Evidence shows significant mobility in income and affluence – 73% of Americans will be in ‘top 20%’ for at least a year: Excerpts: quoted from Mark Rank from the New York Times,

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Is too Much Information Antithetical to Knowledge?

From The Wall Street Journal Book Review: ‘The Power of Knowledge,’ by Jeremy Black The review is by Roger Kimball Excerpt: Although deeply grounded in history from the Middle Ages on down, this book also conjures with contemporary issues. Some

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Political Resistance to Innovation

“The problem of politics is that it does not know how to get less wrong. It is as a practical matter impossible to design a national health-care policy that can be tweaked and improved every quarter, or on-the-fly in real

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The Rich and Poor Rise and Fall Together

Alan Reynolds writes The Truth About the One Percent in The National Review Online Excerpt: The table shown here — which uses Piketty and Saez’s data — shows the top 1 percent’s average real income fell by 16.3 percent from 2007 to

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The Fair Value Fiasco

“One of the basic requirements of the law of supply and demand is that there must be a willing buyer and a willing seller. During the chaos created by the random type of government policies just described, this basic condition

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