The world waits to see if next week is finally the week that the Fed announces its rate hike. Can the economy survive whatever small bump the Fed deals out? Perhaps, but that won’t change the inherent instability of our current monetary regime.
Thomas Piketty is wrong. Markets do not concentrate wealth. They work to diffuse wealth and limit the power of any single enterprise. Meanwhile, many lose their fortunes as quickly as they gain them.
Central bankers would have us believe that creating money “out of thin air” is no problem as long as the “demand for money” increases. They also claim that gold-backed money is more prone to booms and busts. But they’re wrong on both counts.
The sugar industry and the corny syrup industry have been fighting in court. But don't be fooled. Ultimately, the two industries are happy to help each other out in order to keep their own crony-capitalist arrangements in place.
Opponents of austerity have come out to denounce the idea that it’s bad for governments to borrow. They note that there are benefits to borrowing. The distinction they fail to make is that there’s a big difference between private borrowing and government borrowing.
Fractional-reserve banking systems create money out of thin air, and this causes malinvestments into less valuable and less productive activities. Eventually, banks realize there's trouble ahead, so they cut back on loans which leads to deflation and crisis.
Republicans and conservative think tanks are apparently convinced that the key to improving the Federal Reserve is to create a "rules-based" monetary policy. But, as is so often the case with economics, things are much more complicated than they seem.
Amazon has developed a new way to help people do easy work for a little extra cash. The jobs involve repetitive tasks that computers can't do. But, since the jobs pay below minimum wage, we're told the whole thing should be outlawed.
The Paris attacks forced the world's attention away from causes such as the plight of "white privilege" on college campuses and back to the consequences of blowback to interventionist foreign policy. Unfortunately, the political response to these atrocities have been predictable.
