Every indication is that CBDC’s arrival is imminent. Yesterday, several global banks announced a partnership with the NY Federal Reserve to pilot digital dollars. Given the ubiquity of credit/debit cards, payment apps, and other online payment systems, digital money has been bound to happen for some time. The risk isn’t the electronic part, that’s inevitable – it’s the fact that a central bank will oversee the digital currency.
What is happening is people are taking multiple jobs in order to stay abreast of the soaring cost-of-living, and also because work-from-home has made it very easy for free lancers and gig workers—especially in the tech sector—to attach themselves to two, three or even four employer payrolls. These all count as “jobs” in the establishment survey, but not in the household survey.
The Post-Lockdown Labor Market: Weak and Worsening Read More
There will be no going back to 2019 prices in any sector. Powell knows this. He hates it but he is determined not to be blamed for it. For his part, he believes the blame lies elsewhere: with the apocalyptics, the conspirators, a profligate Congress, a confused President, and the shadowy bunch in the national security state. With them, and under this scenario, he is not likely on speaking terms.
Twitter’s phony “content moderation” operation was not unique, but symptomatic of a much broader perversion of corporate management throughout Silicon Valley and much of corporate America, too. In a word, the stock market was so fantastically over-valued owing to the Fed’s egregious money-printing that executives were given leave to pursue their political and ideological hobby horses on a whim, rather than keep their noses on the grindstone of profit and loss.
The Hang Seng correction is a reminder to politicians and pundits the world over that markets are much more powerful than politicians, and they’ll speak their mind in ways that shame those so foolish and so arrogant as to believe that prosperity can be planned. It’s a warning to Xi Jingping, but also a warning to conservatives who should know better, but who presently think that the answer to state planning is more state planning.
Xi Jingping Is Reminded that Markets Don’t Like Central Planning Read More
Economic destruction, increased suicide attempts due to seemingly indefinite isolation, horrifying levels of learning loss, increasing obesity amongst kids, plummeting test scores, increased poverty and hunger, supply chain problems, rampant inflation; all of it is a direct result of policies imposed by terrified, incompetent “experts.”
Economics is about people in their choices and institutions that enable them to thrive. Public health is about the same thing. Driving a wedge between the two surely ranks among the most catastrophic public-policy decisions of our lifetimes. Health and economics both require the nonnegotiable called freedom. May we never again experiment with its near abolition in the name of disease mitigation.
In an explosive new report from the Wall Street Journal, leading health officials began offloading stocks at truly unprecedented rates in January 2020—well before the COVID-19 emergency was declared—with officials at the US Department of Health and Human Services selling 60% more stocks in January 2020 than average over the previous 12 months.
US Government Officials Dumped Stocks Prior to Lockdowns, Report Shows Read More
Washington compensated one and all for the resulting harm and then some by unleashing a $6 trillion spending bacchanalia in less than 14 months, which was accomplished with barely a dissent from either party to the Washington duopoly because interest rates on government debt had plunged to an all-time low. In turn, that was enabled by the most reckless spurt of money printing and debt monetization in recorded history.
The Macroeconomic Consequences of Lockdowns and the Aftermath Read More
Could the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation and its Digital Services Act (DSA) have something to do with PayPal’s skittish forays into “combatting disinformation?” Well, yes, they could, and you may rest assured that EU officials or representatives have already had a word with PayPal about them.
Left alone, recessions are the cure. The problem was that the political class tried to medicate what was healthy. Bernanke fell hard for the medication part. Fast forward to 2008, a falling dollar under the impressively inept President George W. Bush had instigated what Ludwig von Mises referred to in Human Action as a “flight to the real.” Yes, presidents get the dollar they want, Bush wanted a weak one, and a falling dollar drove massive consumption of housing over investment in new ideas.
A bad stagflation is here. Since the Fed will be locked in a battle to tame the price side of the equation even as real output falters for months and years to come, we seriously doubt that the economic contraction to be recorded on Joe Biden’s watch will be described in the history books as a “very slight recession.”
