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A throwaway comment at the end of my previous post may have been misunderstood. So today I’ll provide a more complete interpretation of the market response to the recent election. There were a number of significant market responses to the election, including: 1. Significantly higher stock prices2. A stronger dollar3. Higher interest rates4. Higher inflation .. MORE
Featured Comment
Monetary Policy
Given a choice between the rule of law and the law of rulers, I’d choose the former every time. That’s even true if I happen to agree with the ideology of the people who are currently in change. Thus I’ve consistently opposed “court packing”, regardless of which party is in power at the time. One .. MORE
Energy, Environment, Resources
Toyota USA Chief: Hey, About Those IMPOSSIBLE EV Mandates… by Stephen Green, PJ Media, November 11, 2024. California’s electric vehicle mandates, which go into effect next year, are “impossible” to meet and will result in reduced choices on dealer lots. “I have not seen a forecast by anyone,” Jack Hollis, chief operating officer of .. MORE
Finance: stocks, options, etc.
In September, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain struck a deal with Adolph Hitler. Britain (and France) would allow Germany to seize the parts of Czechoslovakia that were inhabited by ethnic Germans (the Sudetenland), in exchange for a promise not to make any further advances on the country. Upon returning home, he declared that he .. MORE
Economic Growth
Thirty days have passed since my WSJ op/ed last month on the three winners of the Nobel Prize in economics. Therefore I can post the whole op/ed here. A Nobel Prize in Economics for the ‘Inclusive’ Free Market The three laureates’ research demonstrates the importance of property rights and the rule of law. By .. MORE
Economic and Political Philosophy
Winning an election with 50% plus a few (or many) voters does not imply the normative conclusion that the winner is justified to impose policies that significantly harm the other 49% (or fewer). In a free society, the political majority rule has three main justifications. First, it allows to change the rulers when their exercise .. MORE
Labor Market
Imagine that Walt is gently swaying in a hammock on a well-deserved vacation day when his phone rings. It’s his boss. She tells him that his co-worker has an emergency and can’t come into work. Although it’s last minute, she asks if Walt would be willing to work today—otherwise, the store will be too short .. MORE
Explore the lasting legacies and
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Bloggers David Henderson, Alberto Mingardi, Scott Sumner, Pierre Lemieux, Kevin Corcoran, and guests write on topical economics of interest to them, illuminating subjects from politics and finance, to recent films and cultural observations, to history and literature.
Browse our archive of posts by author last nameBooks: Reviews and Suggested Readings
The 20th century produced fictional dystopias besides real ones, yet the best known – like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – originated in liberal democracies. All, however, owe much to a novel from one from one of the real dystopias, We, by the Soviet Union’s Yevgeny Zamyatin. Born in 1887, Zamyatin became a Bolshevik while a .. MORE
Economic Growth
Juliette Sellgren, a senior and economics major at the University of Virginia, has a podcast titled “The Great Antidote.” In October, she interviewed me about the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics: Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson. She contacted me because I wrote, as I have done in most years since .. MORE
Central Planning
Economic planning, where the government uses policies such as taxation, subsidies, spending, or nationalization, in order to direct economic outcomes, is back in vogue. Its proponents often liken economic planning to planning done by individuals in the economy. The difference, they claim, is that national economic planning can help accomplish larger economic, national, or social .. MORE
Book Review of What Went Wrong with Capitalism? by Ruchir Sharma.1 Capitalism has a “Pretty Pig” problem. The reference is to a state fair livestock contest, where there is a judging of the beauty of adult swine. There are only two entrants, because adult swine just aren’t pretty. The first pig is brought out, and .. MORE
This book is about how the world’s religions have gained such power, what they do with it, and how abuses of this power can be constrained. —Paul Seabright, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People,1 p. 6 Paul Seabright’s The Divine Economy investigates how religions gain adherents and acquire wealth and .. MORE
In 1976, Friedrich Hayek effectively read Samuel Smiles out of the classical-liberal movement. In The Mirage of Social Justice, Hayek said that the work of Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) constitutes a snare and a delusion for pro-capitalists. Smiles’s defense of free enterprise, Hayek lamented, seemed to be “the only defence of it which is understood by .. MORE
Characteristically, Friedman had a contrarian take on the Washington consensus. Ironically, the turn toward markets gave new life to the classic institutions of the postwar managed economy, namely the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). No longer working to stabilize a gold-backed currency, the two international organizations offered loans to emerging economies—typically conditional .. MORE
But this is not what is happening. Each side intends to actively harm one-half of the population by restricting what they want to do. Hmm. It seems to me that neither side would agree to..
MarkW, November 12