John Tamny

John Tamny is a popular speaker and author in the U.S. and around the world. His speech topics include "Government Barriers to Economic Growth," "Why Washington and Wall Street are Better Off Living Apart," and more.

Books: Harald Jahner’s ‘Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany’

They “ate, slept, made love, raised children, and tried to keep body and soul together by finding ways to make a living.” Those were the words of the late, great Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page editor George Melloan in his excellent and essential 2016 Great Depression memoir, When the New Deal Came to Town. Melloan was describing life […]

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TikTok Is American Owned. See Elon Musk’s Career If You’re Confused

The big credit card companies “should have killed us when they could have.” Those were the words of early PayPal employee Todd Pearson in Jimmy Soni’s excellent 2022 book, The Founders: The Story of PayPal, and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley.  Not only did the competition not see the future of payments through the unsteady rise

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In Search of a Purpose, the CFPB Tells Banks to Lose Money

Whether it’s Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan talking to their high-net worth prospects, or Edward Jones and Charles Schwab talking to traditional retail customers, there’s a constant theme in the presentations to both: it’s expensive to not be invested. If you miss the ten best market days of any stretch of time, the latter

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Market Prices Are A Very Unreliable Way To Detect Inflation

If you look at the market prices of consumer goods you’ll much more often than not be blinded to inflation’s truth.  To which more than a few readers will reply that prices are precisely the way to divine inflation. Figure that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is “the price of a weighted average market

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There Are No ‘Forgotten’ Americans, Just Immobile Ones

“You don’t have a baby here, you have a funeral expense.” That’s what the doctor said about recently deceased actor Earl Holliman to his parents upon seeing the baby they’d just adopted. The adoption was from a mother who already had nine other children to look after. Holliman’s biological mother was overwhelmed, and had

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De-Regulation Is the Way for DOGE To Have a Real Impact

While politicians frequently and incorrectly demagogue trade as harmful, the enterprising in the proverbial arena have long been looking for ways to bring people closer together not just so that they can exchange goods and services, but also so that they can divide up work that enables the production of exponentially more in the

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Banks Aren’t Interested In Politics, But Politicians Are Interested In Banks

Banks are in the business of paying interest on deposits so that they can lend out the funds deposited with them at a higher rate of interest. Some will respond that the latter is a statement of the obvious, but sometimes the obvious requires stating. In particular it requires stating as banks are accused

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The Surest Sign of Tight Credit? When Central Banks Go to Zero

There’s no such thing as “easy money” or “costless credit” contra what readers are told with great regularity by economists and their enablers in the commentariat. Evidence supporting this statement of the obvious can most easily be found in the powerful force that is compound interest or returns. Precisely due to the power of

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The National Security Angle With TikTok Is Bogus. This Is Industrial Policy

“Let many ideas flourish as industrial policy doesn’t work.” Those are the words of the excellent Andy Kessler in his latest Wall Street Journal opinion piece. Policymakers should embrace Kessler’s logic, all the while applying it to their shameful attempt to force a TikTok divestiture. And yes, the demand from politicians (and upheld last week by the D.C.

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“MMT” Is Basically a Left-Wing Variant of the Austrian School

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is something only economists could have dreamed up. It’s the laughable view that governments can spend without limit so long as they’re the sole issuer of their country’s currency. Except for one problem. If governments were ever reliant on the printing press for their spending power, then it’s safe to

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