interest rates

In the middle of July 2018, President Donald Trump said in an interview that he was “not happy” with the Federal Reserve nudging up interest rates and threatening economic growth in the United States

What we now know to have been one of the worst economic and financial crises of the post-World War II period began about ten years ago in 2007.

When is the price of some marketable good or service at or near zero? When either the supply of it is so plentiful that virtually any demand, no matter how great, can be satisfied. Or when no matter how large or small the supply of it may be, people’s demand for it is so low that nobody is willing to practically pay anything for it.

It is seventy years, now, since near the end of the Second World War Austrian economist, and much later Nobel Prize winner, Friedrich A. Hayek published his most famous article, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in September 1945, demonstrating why it is impossible for a system of socialist central planning to effectively manage a complex and ever-changing economy better than a functioning, competitive free market order.

Since the economic crisis of 2008-2009, the Federal Reserve – America’s central bank – has expanded the money supply in the banking system by over $4 trillion, and has manipulated key interest rates to keep them so artificially low that when adjusted for price inflation, several of them have been actually negative. We should not be surprised if this is setting the stage for another serious economic crisis down the road.

A truly free market economy is one that tends to have the “good deflation,” and we should look forward to it.

President Obama tells us in the Overview to his Fiscal Year 2014 Budget just released last week that his budget proposes, “more than $2 in spending cuts for every $1…

President Obama says that income taxes must be raised on the rich because they don’t pay their fair share.  The indisputable facts from official government sources say otherwise. The CBO…

The Federal Reserve’s “QE2,” also known as round two of quantitative easing, was supposed to drive mortgage interest rates lower, yet they have gone up. Meanwhile, the stock market is…