Thanks to Sanctions, the US Is Losing Its Grip on the Middle East

2023-04-28

The latest Canadian housing data showed a slight uptick in prices and a pause from 2022’s correction, and a new wave of dip buyers has already begun to call this a buying opportunity, as if valuations at ten times average annual income and 50 percent more expensive than their cash flows were anything but still extremely overvalued.
This is merely the most recent development in what appears to be the end of Canada’s massive housing bubble and the beginning of a potential 2008-style recession for the Canadian economy.
Statistical Evidence
Following the 2008 global financial crisis (from which Canada emerged relatively unscathed), the Bank of Canada’s record-low interest rate policy fueled an unprecedented bull market in Canadian real estate.
While prices showed signs of reversal in 2019, the

2023-04-25

Writing for The Volokh Conspiracy, hosted by Reason magazine, George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin argues that the war in Ukraine amounts to a clash between liberal democracy and authoritarian nationalism and that these stakes must be taken into account when continuing to support Ukraine.
Somin argues that the ideology of the winning side in a war receives a boost, pointing to the rise and then fall of fascism and communism. These examples are lacking, to say the least, and hardly prove that a wartime victory necessarily leads to the triumph of the winner’s ideology.
To begin with, Somin’s own examples of the rise of communism and fascism seem to refute his own point. The more or less liberal democratic Entente powers won the First World War, but rather than seeing liberal

2023-04-22

Continued inflation inevitably leads to catastrophe.
—Ludwig von Mises
Consumers’ behaviors cause the consumer price index (CPI) broad heading of food to understate the real or wallet level of inflation. It is much worse than the top line statistic—it is a serious offense to the poor and fixed-income citizens.
The CPI measures nominal dollar changes based on month over month and year over year for 299 items. The year ending December 2021 posted an overall CPI of 3.4 percent. Food at home was up 6.5 percent during this period. For the year ending 2022 the CPI rose 6.5 percent while food rose 10.4 percent. Compounding the two years the CPI rose 11 percent, and the food at home category rose 17.6 percent.
For this same two-year period nominal hourly wages for private industry rose 15