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2024-02-13
It is a running gag among the pro-Taiwan camp that if you were to ask ordinary folks about Taiwan five years earlier, most could not locate Taiwan on a map. At the time, matters relating to China were mainly debates about Donald Trump’s protectionist stance, as relations between Taiwan and China didn’t receive the attention many would warrant in the face of a potential war.
2024-02-10
The wordsmiths at the Federal Reserve wisely omitted the line about a “sound and resilient” banking system in its statement on January 31. That same day shares of New York Community Bank plunged when the bank announced a loss of thirty-six cents per share when analysts expected earnings of twenty-seven cents a share for the fourth quarter.
Internal or external auditors occasionally comb through individual loans in a bank’s portfolio and make judgments as to whether those loans are worth what the bank says they are worth due to lower appraised values and other issues either particular to an individual property or the market as a whole. Bankers then, begrudgingly, set aside earnings for potential loan losses.
In the case of the real estate loans at New York Community Bank, loan examiners
2023-11-14
We hear plenty about threats to American democracy: Donald Trump’s a threat, the Republican party is a threat, and any number of other people or political parties are threats. Now it’s ExxonMobil’s purchase of Pioneer Natural Resources.
Jeff D. Colgan, a professor of political science and the director of the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University, wrote in an easily missed piece entitled “Exxon Mobil’s Pioneer Acquisition Is a Direct Threat to Democracy” for the New York Times, “The democratic argument against the proposed deal is simple. In politics, concentrated interests, like rich corporations, have powerful advantages over diffuse interests, like voters, that can distort outcomes and thwart progress.”
Dr. Colgan’s argument is, of course, all about climate legislation. A bigger
2023-11-09
By popular thinking, whenever the central bank raises the growth rate of the money supply through the buying of financial assets such as Treasuries this pushes the prices of Treasuries higher and their yields lower. This is labeled as the monetary liquidity effect. This effect is inversely correlated with interest rates.
Furthermore, an increase in the money supply after a time lag strengthens economic activity and this pushes interest rates higher. Note that we have here a positive correlation between economic activity and interest rates.
After a much longer time lag, the increase in the growth rate of money supply is starting to exert an upward pressure on the prices of goods and services. Once prices begin to move higher, the inflation expectations effect emerges. Consequently, this is
2023-11-08
As I wrote in my previous piece on statism and the Israel-Hamas conflict, states are organized crime rackets. Wars between states thus represent warfare between rival gangs. The proper libertarian position with reference to such gang wars is neutrality, or the opposition to all state parties to war. Neutrality includes opposition to interventionism, including opposition to sending arms and aid to other nations. Foreign aid increases the tax aggression on the taxpayers of the country that sends aid and increases the recipient state’s control over its own population and over those subject to its aggression.
But I asked a question in that piece that I did not fully answer: Does the libertarian position with reference to war significantly change in considering conflicts between states and
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