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Writing by John Tamny and Parkview contributors, from the latest commentary to the collected archive.
114 essays · Newest first
Clear filtersInflation is all over the news and commentary today, particularly after a presidential election that was allegedly all about it. The problem remains that few who utter the word grasp its singular…
Promoting his new book over the summer, economist Ruchir Sharma managed to get one of its main themes splashed all over the media: “When the price of borrowing money is zero, the price of everything…
According to a recently released report from the New York Fed, Americans collectively owe over $1.1 trillion on their credit cards. Reports like this have a tendency to elicit bad ideas from…
A famous libertarian economic thinker, and memory says it was the late Walter Williams, was once presented on a talk show with the idea of a higher minimum wage. The suggestion was something like…
Talent matched with capital drives all economic advance, always and everywhere. Archaeologists will marvel at how many smart people bought into the Fed myth either way.
Marks came to mind while reading a front page Wall Street Journal story in response to Friday’s employment report. It read along the lines of “Soft Hiring Will Tee Up Fed Rate Cuts.”
Last Tuesday Nvidia shed over $279 billion in value. It was the biggest one-day paper loss for a corporation in the history of the stock market. As a CNN report put it, “only 27 companies on the…
Freedom lovers will love what’s ahead because inequality is the surest sign (and feature) of freedom, and also the most certain sign that former luxuries are being made commonplace. As always, the…
The Fed is no longer the backstop to the financial system on a dark day. It’s the dominant player day in and day out.” Those are the dispiriting words of former Federal Reserve Board member Kevin…
Will the Federal Reserve fiddle with rates more to fight what economists imagine deflation to be? If the question reads as flippant, that’s because it is
The transformation of the Democratic Party donor class from despondent to ebullient in a matter of minutes instructs us in ways well beyond Joe Biden attempting to pass the torch to Kamala Harris.
Monetarism: Government has no resources. It can only spend what it’s taken from us first.
Janet Yellen asserted that “if we do not respond strategically and in a united way” to “China’s industrial policy,” the “viability of businesses in both our countries and around the world could be at…
Put another way, the Fed’s imposition of price ceilings on debit cards will be felt most uncomfortably by those with the most limited access to banking and its various services.
Bernanke’s belief that the Fed’s efforts to foster fake Treasury yields, fake equity and corporate bond prices, more housing consumption, and a weaker dollar are remarkable not just for how much his…
Trump’s delusions, and the gnashing of the teeth of his critics, are yet another reminder that the Fed’s powers over interest rates are vastly overstated.
Money in circulation is an exacting market phenomenon, opposite Monetarists, Neo-Austrians and Keynesians, and it is because goods, services and labor always and everywhere buy goods, services, and…
Fed watchers and economists write about and watch the Fed with breathy intensity. Can it bring prices down? No, it can’t.
Inflation is a policy choice of governments that long predates central banks that the various economic religions have oddly happened on as the creator and fix for inflation.
It’s popular among the conspiracy-minded and central bank-obsessed (frequently the two go together) to suggest that governments establish central banks to buy their debt. The very notion is…
There was a time when it was accepted wisdom at the Hoover Institution that market interventions slowed economic output. How things change.
As always, rising prices can’t cause inflation any more than falling prices can cause deflation. Both are currency phenomena born of currency instability either in the direction of weakness or…
At the Wall Street Journal, Fed-watcher Timiraos writes that with government measures of inflation having “fallen much faster than expected,” nominal interest rates “adjusted for inflation” have…
If a recession is coming, or for that matter growth, money in circulation will reflect either scenario without regard to the central plans of economists and those who revere them.
