When it comes to illuminating the nation’s towering public debt, here are two bookend pictures that are as good as any. In June 1970, when we took leave of protesting the Vietnam War and dodging the draft at Harvard Divinity School in order to pursue the cause of peace and freedom as a congressional

  Now comes an election year that will reveal the utter dysfunction of democratic governance in America. The nation is visibly and inexorably drifting toward fiscal calamity at an accelerating pace, yet the core fiscal issues will be given total dismissal by both of the Uniparty candidates during the upcoming campaigns. In fact, Biden has […]

  There is no peace on earth today for reasons mainly rooted in Imperial Washington — not Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Damascus, Mosul, Raqqa or the rubble of what remains of the Donbas. Imperial Washington has become a global menace owing to what didn’t happen in 1991. At that crucial inflection point, Bush the Elder should […]

  The table below is about as good as it gets when it comes to crystalizing the Fed’s role as a rogue agency that has been wholly captured by its principal constituency. Plain and simple, no rational agency of government would bury itself in $1.014 trillion of losses if it were actually pursuing any plausible […]

  The Alpha and Omega of almost everything that threatens the future of capitalist prosperity and constitutional liberty in America is the Federal Reserve. And its untoward impact goes back decades and decades, taking the form of multiple phases and transmutations as it made its way over the last 110 years to its current malefic […]

  Labor Day isn’t what it used to be. During the 44 years since early 1979 the inflation-adjusted earnings of full-time male workers have gone exactly nowhere. In fact, the figure in Q1 1979 of $408 per week (1982 $) was 4% higher than the $391 level posted for Q2 2023. Stated in today’s dollars […]

  “Stick to the data, not the dogma.” That’s what an ex-Biden economic policy official said when he went on TV crowing about the success of Bidenomics and instructing the Fed about “the data.” The implication was that inflation has been whipped and the economy is humming a Goldilocks tune — so it’s time for […]

  Oops! Interest rates spiked recently with the 10-year benchmark US Treasury (UST) bond rate leaping back above 4.0%, causing stocks and other risk assets to head for the hills. That lurch resulted from some noisy jobs data that implied the Fed is by no means done with its interest normalization campaign. The vaunted “Pivot” […]

  Two of this era’s most notorious Keynesian economy-wreckers — Ben Bernanke of the Fed and Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist of the IMF — have published a new algebra paper that addresses a question that Milton Friedman definitively answered long ago, when he averred, “Inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon.” But now […]

  There can no longer be any doubt that the Federal Reserve is wreaking havoc with economic rationality. There is an absolute fiscal and monetary train wreck coming down the pike at full speed ahead. That enables Washington to borrow monumental sums from future taxpayers with heedless indifference, while the Wall Street casino takes leave […]

  Government policy should depend on the stocks, not the flows. In other words, it should focus on absolute values, rather than how things are changing. But we operate in a thoroughly Keynesian world where the former are ignored almost entirely by Wall Street and Washington alike. Well, except when balance sheets explode and everyone […]

  We do not use the term “monetary central planning” lightly. It has distinct connotations such as heavy-handed, dominating and compelling. When it comes to economics of course, heavy-handed command and control is what socialist states do, whether it’s the pure communist variety, such as Xi Jinping’s new edict that the People’s Bank of China […]

  Both the gamblers on Wall Street and the borrow-and-spend denizens of the Capital Beltway are desperately hoping that inflation is about ready to keel over, thereby paving the way for the Fed to “pivot” to a new round of massive easing and bond-buying. That would be copacetic, of course, because it would allow Washington […]