…Calmly observing the changing world

When we are children, we conceive of banks as places to safely deposit money. If, by chance, you grew up watching It’s A Wonderful Life every Christmas, you probably have the idea that money deposited in banks is loaned out into your community:

If modern banking truly worked this way, you would understand that when people [...]

Marxist czars are ascending to heights of power over the American economy. Bankrupt corporations stay in business by borrowing money at near-zero interest rates from the equally bankrupt government. The invisible hand of the market has been replaced by the translucent hand of the Federal Reserve as they no longer conceal their “ongoing market activities”.
Welcome [...]

Sometimes writers and entertainers struggle to come up with content that illustrates the hidden absurdities in the news by drawing comparisons to fictional scenarios which are obviously absurd. However, it seems that more and more, the real news is so bizarre, and so difficult to believe on its own, that no fictional parody is required. [...]

It seems that if you are an economist, you can contort your mind into believing that spending causes wealth. Once you have accomplished this task, everything else seems to flow fairly easily. Pretty soon, you start to believe that governments should increase spending during recessions to boost the economy, and maybe eventually that we can [...]

The global economic crisis affects every country in slightly different ways. For Iceland, it meant a currency collapse, which is perhaps preferable to the non-currency collapse of Ireland, whose Euro-strangled economy is truly on the brink (Telegraph).
But what about those countries that are already poor? Do they have even farther to fall, or will they [...]

Whenever the economy is “bad”, it is always the number one issue: it’s the economy stupid. So somehow, to get Obama’s policies implemented, he will have to couch them in economic terms. That the result becomes completely nonsensical hasn’t seem to have detered him.
President Obama’s latest push for health care involves economic arguments in favor of [...]

The monetary system of the United States is controlled by the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank whose shareholders are unknown, whose profits are unknown, and whose policies are only deciphered through Congressional hearings – during which representatives of the Federal Reserve speak in FedSpeak, and run intellectual rings around most of the Congressmen, [...]

In a wild and crazy financial story (no… really!), two Japanese citizens were caught by Italian border patrol agents while on a train at Chiasso headed to Switzerland with an unusual amount of foreign bonds. To be clear, by “foreign bonds” in this case I mean American. And by “an unusual amount”, I mean $134,500,000,000 [...]

I’ve never known quite what to make of memorial day celebrations, but I try not to take things too literally. I fail, but I try. Some people went to parades, or even tea parties. Maybe some somberly went to cemetaries, and hopefully everyone at least thought of the sacrifice that freedom requires, and was thankful for those [...]

As the relentless forces of globalism seemingly march towards complete domination of our economic environment, it’s fascinating to see the most ancient and local of all economic forces starting anew in the United States: the market.
Yesterday, I walked about 3 blocks from my house to the local Saturday Market (the “farmers’ market”). It’s only May, [...]