Suppose you’re driving a car, and you turn the steering wheel right. You will feel the door and pillar of the car push your left shoulder (in a left-drive car). This is an observed fact. Common Sense Physics One idea—let’s call it common sense physics—is that a force is pushing you outward into the door. […]
Picture a scene in one of those action moves. Two guys are fighting for control over the steering wheel. The car is going 75mph, the road is narrow, and there is a drop over a cliff on one side. And there are lots of sharp curves. Central Planning This is a pretty good picture of […]
Have you ever heard someone say this? It falls into the category of, it’s so perverse, so wrong, and so wrong-headed that there has got to be a constituency out there somewhere, to assert this! First, let’s head off at the pass the objection that the majority of US government debt is held by foreigners. […]
Money has a dual function. Please allow us to go deeper, and more philosophical than we typically do. We promise to tie this into our ongoing discussion of capital consumption. In the following, we will discuss some examples that use the dollar. We are not conceding that the dollar is money (i.e. the most marketable […]
Since 1981, interest rates have been in a falling trend. Last week, we said this trend will continue, and the present blip up in rates is just a correction. We did not argue technical analysis, nor quantity of dollars, nor the general price level. Instead, we asked a question: …It seems obvious that if one […]
The hot topic in monetary economics today (hah, if it’s not an oxymoron to say these terms together!) is whither interest rates. The Fed in its recent statement said the risk is balanced (the debunked notion of a tradeoff between unemployment and rising consumer prices should have been tossed on the ash heap of history […]
A reader asked us this week about the personal savings rate. Most people can sense that something is wrong if the rate is in a long-term falling trend, or if it falls too low (whatever level that may be). We argue that falling savings is part of the larger process of capital destruction. And unfortunately, […]
Further to our ongoing theme of capital destruction, let’s look at a topic which is currently out of favor in the present market correction. Keynes called for pushing the interest rate down near to zero, as a way of killing the savers, whom be believed are functionless parasites. The interest rate has been falling since […]
Back in the drug-soaked, if not halcyon, days known at the sexual and drug revolution—the 1960’s—many people were on a quest for the “perfect trip”, and the “perfect hit of acid” (the drug lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD). We will no doubt generate some hate mail for saying this, but we don’t believe that anyone ever […]
Do you want to lend your hard-earned money to the US government? In exchange for the high, high interest rate of 2.8%? It’s a most generous deal, even though the Federal Reserve is committed to dollar devaluation at the rate of 2% per annum. So you are getting 0.8% per year, assuming that the Fed […]
