Whither Goest the Entrepreneur

2023-01-18

Those who know Wall Street lore sometimes recall that Fed chairman William Miller—Paul Volcker’s immediate predecessor—joked that most Americans believed the Federal Reserve was either an Indian reservation, a wildlife preserve, or a brand of whiskey. The Fed, of course, is none of those things, but there’s also one other thing the Federal Reserve is not: an actual bank. It is simply a government agency that does bank-like things.

2023-01-14

You’re more likely to die of heart disease than anything else, partly because, well, if nothing else gets you, your heart will give out. And a heart attack could cost you upwards of $760,000 these days, when you consider hospital charges, prescription drugs, additional care for the rest of your life, and then indirect costs like loss of time at work.

2023-01-11

After years spent toiling as an activist against the tide of Czech politics, Vít Jedlička concluded that it would be easier to build a libertarian nation from scratch somewhere else. In April 2015, he declared that a new country called the Free Republic of Liberland would be founded on unclaimed land on the Danube River.

2023-01-11

In recent years, it has become popular in parts of conservative discourse to discuss the “Brazilianization of America,” a reference to the challenges a large country faces in governing an increasingly multicultural “universal nation.” But this weekend, it was the Americanization of Brazilian politics that took center stage as pro-Bolsonaro forces rose up in aggressive protest against the newly inaugurated Lula regime, in a move reminiscent of what played out in Washington on January 6, 2021.

2023-01-05

After more than $20 trillion in stimulus plans since 2020, the economy is going into stagnation with elevated inflation. Global governments announced more than $12 trillion in stimulus measures in 2020 alone, and central banks bloated their balance sheet by $8 trillion.