Argentina Sleepwalks into Hyperinflation (Yet Again)

2023-03-10

If you watched the Fed Chair Jerome Powell testify before the senate and the House, you heard over and over that banks are well capitalized. The non-sequitur should inspire the Shakespearean quote “Methinks you protest too much.” The very next day after the hearings, shares of SVB Financial Group, parent of Silicon Valley Bank, fell 60 percent (and another 30 percent in afterhours trading at this writing) after a Wall Street Journal article revealed, the bank “had sold large portions of its securities portfolio and would raise fresh capital, highlighting a broader problem for U.S. lenders who have seen rising interest rates hammer the values of their bond holdings.”
In What Has Government Done to Our Money? Murray Rothbard reminded us:
The bank creates new money out of thin air, and does

2023-03-09

As the State of the Union address and subsequent pronouncements have made clear, American politics is in the firm grip of fiscal illusion.
One example is President Biden’s bragging that “In the last two years, my administration has cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion—the largest deficit reduction in American history,” which implied that we should only look at a short run effect which had little, if anything, to do with the policies he adopted, in evaluating his fiscal policy.
However, he did not mention that the CBO estimates that the average yearly federal deficit over the next decade will be $1.6 trillion (under current policies, not including any expansions that have not yet been enacted), which implies his current policies continue to massively rip off future generations.

2023-03-08

“Governments create money all the time. We do that for war.”
“This whole notion that you run government like you run a household…is a complete myth”Economist Prof Mariana Mazzucato tells #Newsnight Government’s should address social issues through taxhttps://t.co/P0zxS1DNGF pic.twitter.com/I6NLtXgDqN— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) March 6, 2023This is the argument for more money printing, and perhaps unlimited money printing, recently advanced by Professor Mariana Mazzucato on prime-time BBC.
Channeling Warren Mosler, the godfather of modern monetary theory, Dr. Mazzucato argues against “austerity”—by which she means any natural restraints on government spending. In order to spend, sovereign states need not “earn” tax revenue like a household must earn money, nor do they need to

2023-03-03

The largest urban mass-transit systems across the US are entering an all too familiar point in their long history: another looming financial disaster caused by financial mismanagement and the consequences of covid. No urban transit system exemplifies this problem more than the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in New York.
Ridership in New York has not rebounded to precovid levels, and the MTA is projected to have a funding gap of $1.6 billion in 2026 despite proposing a 5.5 percent increase in fares and tolls. At the same time, New York governor Kathy Hochul and MTA announced in January 2022 the second phase of the Second Avenue subway. The extension of the subway line in New York by 1.6 miles will cost an estimated $6.3 billion ($3.9 billion per mile), the highest cost of any