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Writing by John Tamny and Parkview contributors, from the latest commentary to the collected archive.
84 essays · Newest first
Clear filtersThere are no benefits to be had from a weak dollar. None. To suggest there are is the equivalent of saying a basketball player benefits from a shrinking inch and foot that will make him taller in…
Berkshire Hathaway has $340 billion in cash and cash equivalents. Media speculation indicates that the sidelined funds signal Warren Buffett’s belief that corporations are presently overvalued. …
At least 66 countries peg their currencies to the dollar. The previous number undercounts the actual number. Figure that the growth of cryptocurrencies is largely a dollar peg story (think…
Do you take Amazon or Walmart dollars? In the question it’s easy to see the problem with bitcoin, and other well-known speculations. People aren’t prone to storing their wealth meant for essentials…
Presidents get the dollar they want, and George W. Bush wanted a weaker one. Bush’s departure from the Reagan/Clinton era of a largely strong, stable dollar as a measure of constant objective value…
In their recent Wall Street Journal essay, George Gilder and Gale Pooley called for a “time-price index, or TPI.” They crucially reminded readers that “while we buy things with money, we actually pay…
Prices are what organize the market economy, which means prices are a crucial form of communication that governments should never, ever meddle with. Too bad Milton Friedman’s monetarism continues to…
Gold and the foot are constants. You don’t adjust value and height against them, rather you adjust the value of everything else and length of everything else in terms of gold and the foot. Consider…
President Trump is doing major damage to his presidency. And no, this opinion piece is not about tariffs. Much more economically damaging than tariffs is a falling currency. Gold is at all-time…
If the U.S. were ever so foolishly intent on shrinking inequality, doing so would be easy: abolish usage of cars, planes, computers, smartphones and the internet. Presto, inequality shrunk…
Wise minds inside any presidential administration would quickly sell every barrel of oil presently stored in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Forgetting for a minute that there’s nothing about energy…
A gold standard would do wonders for economic growth, but would almost certainly not limit the growth of our federal government. The view that it would insults markets at least three times, but…
Private, or “crypto” money will eventually replace government money. Bank on it. As written in The Money Confusion, profits from the trading of fiat currency chaos ($7 trillion per day worth of…
Without defending Joe Biden’s unfortunate presidency, future economics books will correct the “Bidenflation” narrative that Republicans and Democrats continue to embrace. Inflation is a decline in…
“They have treated us very unfairly on trade.” That’s one of President Trump’s most frequent economic themes, and he has a point. So do “they.” To see why, it’s easy to forget that no one buys or…
Central banks don’t “supply” dollars to cities, states and nations, rather dollars are an automatic effect of production in cities, states and nations. Contrary to what most economists believe,…
Bitcoin “doesn’t trade on fundamentals, but supply and demand.” The previous point was made in a recent column meant to explain the surging value of the most prominent crypto concept. In the same…
“We require a commitment from those countries that they will neither create a new BRICS currency, nor back any other currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs, and…
Bitcoin in its present, high-profile form cannot be money. About the previous assertion, it should in no way be taken as a knock on crypto, or private money more broadly. Evidence supporting the…
Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane has long said in print, on television and in person that a focus on economic growth misses the point. Paraphrasing Crane, if the people are free they’ll have all…
Every so often it’s useful to quote arguably the most important passage from Wall Street Journal reporter Craig Karmin’s 2008 book, Biography of the Dollar. Karmin noted that prior to 1971, there…
Gold is referred to as a constant for good reason. It’s price doesn’t move. What moves are the currencies in which it’s priced. Which is a reminder that when the price of gold in dollars declines,…
ber really started to become a thing in 2012. It was a spectacular revelation. Gone were the days of worrying about calling a cab or hailing one in order to get to the airport. Similarly gone were…
Do you the reader transact with cryptocurrencies? Do you store wealth in them? Particularly if the answer is no, it’s useful to think about such an answer in light of a recent national poll conducted…
