Should Local Municipalities Default on Their Debts? Seems Like a Good Idea

2023-04-13

Among the many facts of modern life that are accepted without question by most ordinary people is that it is somehow perfectly natural, expected, and unremarkable that every sovereign state should have its own currency. We see this everywhere in names such as "the U.S. dollar" or "the Chinese yuan" or "the Japanese yen." Indeed, among the 203 sovereign states of the world, there are nearly as many separate national currencies. The euro, of course, is a notable—and recent—exception to this, but even after more than 20 years of the euro, only 26 of the world’s states use it. Many of those are very small states such as Andorra, Vatican City, Malta, and Latvia. Moreover, the British refuse to give up the pound sterling. The Swedes are sticking with the krona. The Swiss still have the franc.

2023-04-12

News reports have been studded in recent weeks with talk of a “national divorce.” Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been the face of the national divorce movement, but she is hardly alone in her view that Republican and Democrat states need to go their separate ways. For example, a March poll of American adults found that 20 percent of respondents favored splitting the country up along red and blue lines.
At the state level, too, talk of secession and redrawing state borders is heating up. Californians fed up with high taxes, crippling government regulations, and Jabba the Hutt–level bloated bureaucracy have long been discussing splitting their state into three, with six counties stretching from Monterey to Los Angeles forming the stump of California while northern

2023-04-10

Following the violent attack on Americans in the Mexican border city of Matamoros in early March, South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham stated that he was prepared to get tough and introduce legislation to set the stage for US military intervention in Mexico. The move would be a significant escalation in the long-running war on drugs that has been raging under the auspices of the United States for many decades to the dismay of many Latin American countries.
Graham continues to ignore the disastrous results of the use of force in US foreign policy as he eyes adding Mexico to his growing bucket list of interventionist missions. If previous interventions serve as examples, a US military intervention in Mexico would be just another excuse to expand national security interests and

2023-04-06

As evidenced by a number of recent policy changes in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil, the status of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency is under coordinated attack. Efforts to dethrone the dollar, however, will require time and luck in favor of antidollar forces. For now, however, the US dollar is the most preferred currency for foreign reserves and for settling international transactions.
The fact that the dollar is the most popular currency right now is no guarantee it will be so into the medium or long run. No currency remains the reserve currency forever, and the US dollar has only been the world’s reserve currency since the 1930s. Before then, the global reserve currency was the pound sterling. But thanks to the World Wars, the costs of a colonial empire, and an