Government, Markets, and You
Who will Decide the 2024 Presidential Election?
One thing is certain about the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump’s opponents will stop at nothing, short, I hope, of violence, to keep him out of the White House. Fair or unfair, legal or illegal, Democrats will continue to use the judicial system not just to...
Sowell’s Questions: What You Should Ask About Any Political Proposal
How do you decide whether some politician’s or government official’s proposal makes sense, i.e., whether, on balance, it will make your and other people’s lives better? None of us has the time to explore all the ins and outs. How then do we balance making the best...
America’s Second Civil War
America is engaged in its second civil war. Like the first, the war is over an idea. Under sustained attack is the idea of America as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Founding Fathers set the preservation of individual freedom as...
How America Can Come Back from Chaos
The chaos and ruin in America today is exceptional: our open border, the intellectual and moral corruption of the mainstream media, wokeness over readiness in the military, an educational system that indoctrinates but does not educate, decriminalization, resurgent...
Letter to My Children on How to Invest Their Money
I have approached the challenge of advising you on how to invest your money with trepidation. Having invested other people’s money and my own for decades, I know that the world is a lot more complex and subtle than even the smartest guys in the room can comprehend....
Financial Cassandras: Early or Just Wrong?
People like me have been warning for years that the response of the Federal Reserve and the federal government to the 2007-2008 Great Financial Crisis (GFC) fixed nothing, and a worse financial crisis is in the offing. In the meantime, stock indexes are near their...
America’s Second Civil War
America is engaged in its second civil war. Like the first, the war is over an idea. Under sustained attack is the idea of America as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The Founding Fathers set the preservation of individual freedom as...
Why You Should Own Some Physical Gold
Warren Buffett, as usual, was right: gold is not an investment. It yields nothing and never grows. Gold, instead, is money: something people use to (1) exchange what they have for what they want, (2) store their purchasing power, and (3) know precisely how much they...
Why we must speak out against wokeness and how
If you are like me, you are sick of the smug, ignorant, destructive drivel from the “Woke” crowd. “Wokeness” connotes exquisite sensitivity to racial or social discrimination and injustice, as defined by the beholder. Niggling questions about what constitutes...
Is TINA faithful?
By any measure, stock prices relative to any rational measure of economic value are at record levels. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4404673-is-this-the-biggest-financial-bubble-ever-hell-yes-it-is The main driver of what appears to be an epochal bubble in the...
Is the “Sky is Falling” Crowd Wrong?
I have been a card carrying member of the “sky is falling” crowd for years. And I have been wrong. Stock prices are at their all-time highs. Some stocks are selling at multiples of sales that historically have been applied to earnings. Why was I wrong and what are the...
What the rise of Trump means and what’s next
Intense dislike of Trump is causing people to miss something big. Trump’s rise and popularity is a symptom of a trend, not a one-time aberration. A bottom-up reaction is emerging in Europe and America against a force that has been ascendant under many guises for over...
Single payer health care: a quack cure
The American left, which now dominates the Democratic Party, thinks it has a sure-fire winner in its advocacy of a single-payer system for America. Under single-payer, government becomes the sole source of reimbursement for health care services. Federal bureaucrats...
Socialism popular failure,capitalism unpopular success
Socialism is a failure – but popular. Capitalism is a success — but unpopular. Why? Socialism always and everywhere eventually has ended up creating economic stagnation and loss of freedom. The more aggressively it has been tried — think the old Soviet Union and Mao...
How to think about capitalism
James Lee Burke in his novel, Robicheaux, reminded me of something none of us should ever forget, “People are what they do, not what they think, not what they say.” The same is true for government policies and economic systems. What counts is how they perform, not how...
The Federal Reserve: a nemesis, not a hero
John Maynard Keynes, whose wrong-headed ideas dominate economic policy making almost everywhere, did get this right: “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency… Lenin was certainly right. There is...
How I invest my own money.
In this post I argue that you should pay attention to someone only if he personally gains or loses, depending on whether what he says proves true, and in this post I opine that there is a serious economic train wreck in our future. If I am not acting according to my...
The Trump tax cut will not turbocharge the economy.
Fans of the Trump tax (TTC) cut believe it will stimulate economic growth. Their belief is not supported by arithmetic and history. According to David Stockman, who was Reagan’s Budget Director, The impact of the Trump cuts is trivial when compared to that of the...
The economy: good times to roll or looming train wreck
I sound like Chicken Little, cautioning that while the sky is not falling right now, it will at some unknowable time in the not-too-distant future – anywhere from tomorrow to a few years from now. And the fall will be worse than what any of us has seen in our...
Tariffs: possible short term gain, sure long term pain
If you want to be a competent economist without having to suffer through grasping abstract ideas, many of which are flawed, as well as mastering higher mathematics, all you have to do is remember the words of the great 19th century economist Frederic Bastiat. He...