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Latest Articles: Economy
A Game No One Can Win: China Retaliates Against Biden’s Chip War
Post Date: 2023-07-08 01:08:18 by Charles_Byrd
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Biden has further restricted China’s access to sophisticated chips. China placed exports controls on crucial minerals in return. On June 27, The Wall Street Journal reported U.S. Considers New Curbs on AI Chip Exports to China Click for Full Text!
Can Capitalism Survive?
Post Date: 2023-07-05 01:01:06 by Charles_Byrd
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One of the signs of advancing age in the American college professor is a tendency for him to write less and publish more. This seeming paradox is easily explained by the phenomenon of Collected Works, that is, by what on television would be described as reruns. As in television, no great public outcry is needed to bring forth the reruns; a question from his wife, a polite suggestion from a colleague, and the cut-and-paste operation is under way.I have put together here what I believe to be the best of the rather meager output of my professional career up to this point. For reasons (mostly financial) that always seemed adequate at the moment, I have been more of a speechmaker than a writer. ...
The Make-or-Break Fork in the Road Ahead
Post Date: 2023-07-04 00:36:58 by Charles_Byrd
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We either make the future or break the future, so choose wisely. Click for Full Text!
Bankruptcy Filings Surge in First Half of 2023 in US
Post Date: 2023-07-03 18:28:01 by Charles_Byrd
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U.S. Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings jumped 68% in the first half of 2023 from a year earlier, Epiq Bankruptcy, a provider of U.S. bankruptcy filing data, said Monday. SVB Financial Group, Envision Healthcare Corp, Bed Bath & Beyond, Party City Holdco, Lordstown Motors and Kidde-Fenwal were among some casualties of decades-high interest rates and sticky inflation as the era of easy money drew to a close. Click for Full Text!
“Bidenomics”: More Spending, More Regulations, Higher Taxes
Post Date: 2023-06-30 00:19:27 by Charles_Byrd
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To hear Joe Biden tout the benefits of his so-called Bidenomics program, one would think things in the country are just ducky. Unfortunately for Biden and his plans to ride this program into the White House in 2024, the American people aren’t stupid. The plan, touted in Chicago yesterday, includes making public investments, empowering and educating American workers, and promoting competition. Click for Full Text!
Yes, the U.S. Economy Continues To Move in the Wrong Direction…
Post Date: 2023-06-28 18:20:16 by Charles_Byrd
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Despite so much evidence to the contrary, the Biden administration continues to insist that the U.S. economy is on the right track. But is that really true? Thanks to the Federal Reserve, interest rates are now much higher and the money supply has been contracting at the fastest pace since the Great Depression. As a result, large companies have been conducting mass layoffs, the housing bubble is imploding, and economic activity is rapidly slowing down all over the nation. But if you ask Joe Biden and his minions, what we are witnessing is all part of the plan. In fact, they continue to speak of “Bidenomics” as if it is a good thing… Click for Full Text!
Powell’s Pause Isn’t a Surrender, Nor Is it a Victory Lap
Post Date: 2023-06-23 19:48:11 by Charles_Byrd
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It’s been a week since the FOMC gave the market every thing it wanted. After fifteen months it finally got a pause in rate hikes. Pauses in rate hikes are always harbingers of the next rate cut being around the corner. So, why aren’t markets happy? Click for Full Text!
Updating Say’s Law for Modern Times
Post Date: 2023-06-23 19:20:27 by Charles_Byrd
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It was Keynes’ offhand dismissal of Say’s law, or the law of the markets, in 1936 which is leading us into an economic and monetary crisis. It was dismissed by him to invent a role for the state. Click for Full Text!
Fortress America—The Only Alternative To Fiscal Ruin
Post Date: 2023-06-23 18:28:56 by Charles_Byrd
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That didn’t take long. Twelve days after Biden signed the ballyhooed legislation unfreezing the nation’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling, the public debt crossed the $32 trillion mark on June 16th. And that was only nine months after it crossed the $31 trillion level in October 2022. Click for Full Text!
To Many Americans, It Already Feels Like We Are in a Deep Recession
Post Date: 2023-06-20 16:18:29 by Charles_Byrd
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Are you deeply struggling right now? If so, I want you to know that you are not alone. The things that I am about to share with you are not meant to be depressing. Rather, I hope that you will be encouraged to see that there are countless others in the exact same boat. Over the past few years, the cost of living has been rising much faster than paychecks have, and this has put enormous financial pressure on millions of American families. In some cases, families are dealing with extreme financial stress even though both parents are working good jobs. Virtually everything has become substantially more expensive, and so our money is not going nearly as far as it once did. Unfortunately, the ...
Core Inflation is Much Stickier Than the Fed Expected, Now What?
Post Date: 2023-06-20 16:15:29 by Charles_Byrd
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The lead chart shows CPI inflation cooled from 9.1 percent to 4.0 percent. Core CPI inflation, excluding food and energy only decline modestly, from 6.6 percent to 5.3 percent. The Fed’s preferred measure if inflation, PCE, declined only from 5.4 percent to 4.7 percent. The Fed says it will get PCE inflation down to 2.0 percent. When? How? Click for Full Text!
The Commercial Real Estate Tsunami Just Shifted Into Another Gear
Post Date: 2023-06-16 01:52:47 by Charles_Byrd
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What is going to happen to our banking system as trillions of dollars worth of commercial real estate loans go bad? Many months ago, I warned that the greatest commercial real estate crisis in U.S. history was coming. At the time, a lot of people didn’t believe me and that was fine. As with so many other things, all I needed to do to be proven right was to wait. Sadly, a commercial real estate tsunami is now here, and it appears to be accelerating even faster than many of the experts had been anticipating. Just within the past few weeks, there have been several more high profile defaults, and San Francisco has become the epicenter of this crisis. On Monday, we learned that Westfield ...
To Consumers, All Costs are Transaction Costs
Post Date: 2023-06-15 23:59:56 by Charles_Byrd
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In my podcast, The Answer is Transaction Costs, I have been working on the problem of transactions and what it means to change aspects of purchase or sale without otherwise changing the product. One of the great insights of economist Yoram Barzel was that it makes no sense to talk about commodities in the abstract, because it is the precise features of accessing, delivering, and using the product that affect the cost of use. In fact, though, the insight is older. I had always heard of John R. Commons, one of the founders of the “Institutionalist School” of economics, but I had not read him until recently. Click for Full Text!
They Are Never Going To See It Coming, and so They Won’t Be Prepared…
Post Date: 2023-06-11 02:33:52 by Charles_Byrd
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There is nothing wrong with being optimistic, but blind optimism can be a very dangerous thing. The reason why so many of the “experts” were shocked by the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 is because they didn’t want to believe that such a thing could happen. Unfortunately, we are witnessing a similar pattern now. Even though we are absolutely drowning in debt, inflation is wildly out of control, our currency is being transformed into toilet paper, the housing market has started to crash and mass layoffs are being conducted all over the nation, a lot of the “experts” continue to insist that everything is going to be just fine. For example, the following comes from a ...
A Wealth Tax Reality Check
Post Date: 2023-06-07 19:48:59 by Charles_Byrd
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At every opportunity, President Joe Biden has pressed a central tenet of his social agenda: “Extremely wealthy Americans don’t pay their fair share of federal income taxes” (emphasis added). By Internal Revenue Service definitions of income, top income earners generally pay a far greater federal income-tax share than do lower income groups. Without saying so, the President has greatly expanded wealthy Americans’ income to include their considerable unrealized capital gains, dramatically lowering their income-tax rate, which he uses to advance his wealth-tax case. To initiate wealth taxation, Biden proposes a “minimum billionaires tax,” under which wealthy ...
Wealth Taxes: The Tale of “Tuh”
Post Date: 2023-06-07 18:52:06 by Charles_Byrd
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There is a big push to implement wealth taxes, partly as a way of raising revenue, but mostly as a punitive measure to reduce inequality. In fact, our politicians have been refreshingly candid: The goal is to punish the rich, even if it harms the overall economy. This is pure naked economic puritanism, of the moralistic sort. But how can that be? Remember, we already tax income. If you want to tax income more, or less, then at least that is something that is an established activity of government, at the state and local levels. Click for Full Text!
Decentralization and Bitcoin
Post Date: 2023-06-06 18:06:10 by Charles_Byrd
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From the late-1980s until the early 2000s, the Cypherpunks – a group of cryptographers, mathematicians, computer scientists and activists – worked to build what they referred to as a crypto-anarchist “Galt’s Gulch in cyberspace.” This virtual place would be one where individuals from around the world could communicate and engage in commerce, with property rights protected, with contracts enforced, and with its own native digital currency. These Cypherpunks are widely credited to having significant involvement in the development of (or influence on) projects such as Tor, anonymous remailers, PGP for email encryption, OTR for chat encryption, BitTorrent, Wikileaks, ...
The Cooperative Capitalism of Adam Smith
Post Date: 2023-06-06 17:55:41 by Charles_Byrd
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Important people in history are typically commemorated on their birthdays. But some have unknown birthdays, making that tradition difficult to honor. For example, Adam Smith, history’s most famous economist, illustrates such difficulties. Some sources list his birth as June 16, 1723 while others put it on June 5 of that year (due to the use of different calendars). Still others say we don’t know when he was born but give one of those dates as when he was baptized, of which we do have a record. Despite that problem, we are certain that this year is the tricentennial of Adam Smith’s birth, making this a very appropriate time to remember him and celebrate his valuable insights. ...
The Great Student Loan Nonpayment Boondoggle Is Over and Household Spending Is About To Collapse
Post Date: 2023-06-02 00:37:51 by Charles_Byrd
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In the small print detailing the end of the debt ceiling melodrama which, as we explained, is a farce as it boosts inflation-adjusted spending contrary to Republican promises, there was some actual news: the great student loan boondoggle is about to come to a screeching halt, after a three year “emergency pause” which redirected tens of billions in dollars away from mandatory student loan repayment to other forms of discretionary spending. According to Goldman, the agreement announced on Saturday between uniparty leaders Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy titled hilariously the “Fiscal Responsibility Act”, prohibits the Biden Administration from extending the pause on student ...
This Is the End of a Mega-Cycle
Post Date: 2023-06-02 00:34:40 by Charles_Byrd
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Have we finally reached the end of the road? When it comes to the economy, most of us focus on short-term cycles. In recent years there have been times when the economy has been growing and there have been times when the economy has been shrinking, but all of those short-term fluctuations have happened in the context of a long-term trend of debt- fueled “growth”. We have been relentlessly stealing from the future in order to make the present more pleasant, and most of us pretend that the piper will never have to be paid. But of course the truth is that a day of reckoning is fast approaching, and that day of reckoning is going to be immensely painful. Earlier today, I came across ...
Continuing to Get Straight the Facts About the American Economy
Post Date: 2023-06-02 00:09:00 by Charles_Byrd
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The barrage of mistaken claims about long-term economic trends affecting ordinary Americans is unremitting. So too, therefore, must corrections of these claims be unremitting. One especially vivid correction is Art Carden’s recent reflection on Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion. As Art argues, comparing Elvis Presley’s mid-1970s lifestyle to that of middle- class Americans today provides powerful evidence against conventional wisdom which holds that economic growth has for the past half-century benefited only the superrich. Extensive empirical support for Art’s argument appears throughout Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early’s (GEE’s) excellent 2022 ...
The Republican Debt-Ceiling "Deal" Is Exactly What We Expected
Post Date: 2023-06-01 23:47:48 by Charles_Byrd
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After countless predictions of economic armaggeddon and panicky entreaties to raise the debt ceiling with no strings attached, the Biden White House and Congressional Republicans agreed on a new budget deal this week that does virtually nothing at all to change the status quo. The deal in no way returns federal spending to pre-covid levels. Click for Full Text!
It's Happening: Fisk Gives Slight Downgrade to US Credit
Post Date: 2023-05-28 03:28:54 by Charles_Byrd
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My recent big prediction proved true this morning, which was that credit rating agencies will certainly not wait for an actual default on US debt before they start to downgrade US credit. Now, you might think that was an obvious prediction, but you didn’t hear many others warning about it; and US government officials certainly have not acted as if they realize that simple fact, nor said anything about it. So, it is an easy prediction that seems to elude almost everyone! And it is a BIG prediction because today’s news begins the downgrade process that will be devastating if it goes one step further. Today’s staunch credit warning from one of the nation’s big-three rating ...
The debt ceiling melodrama is a Uniparty diversion from reality
Post Date: 2023-05-28 03:09:19 by Charles_Byrd
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The Swamp People want to convince you that they truly care about our government’s expansion and spending addiction, and they’re putting on a show for every television camera they can find. Click for Full Text!
Biden's economy leaving millions of families struggling to make ends meet
Post Date: 2023-05-26 00:15:58 by Charles_Byrd
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Joe Biden's economic policies for America – including his 9.1% inflation of just a year ago, his exploding interest rates to address that, and much more – have left tens of millions of American families struggling to makes ends meet. New Census data documented by Just the News reveals that 89.1 million people across the nation reported it was "somewhat or very difficult to pay for usual home expenses" from April 26-May 8. Click for Full Text!
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