Monthly Archive: November 2024

We’re Already on Track for a $2 Trillion Deficit this Year

2024-11-15

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2024-11-15

The Treasury Department posted its latest revenue and spending totals this week, and deficits continue to mount at impressive speed. During October—the first month of the 2025 fiscal year—the federal deficit was more than a quarter of a trillion dollars, coming in at $257.4 billion. Tax revenue in October had totaled $326 billion, but spending totaled $584 billion. Now one month into the new fiscal year, the federal government is on pace to add...

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FX and Rates Unwind Yesterday’s Powell Effect, US Index Futures Slide

2024-11-15

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2024-11-15

Overview:  The dollar bounced, and US rates rose yesterday afternoon in response to comments by Fed Chair Powell. But he did little more that reiterate what he had said at the recent press conference. Powell expressed a lack of urgency to move after having led the central bank in delivering a 50 bp cut to start the easing in September while indicating that direction of travel will be to a less restrictive rate. The dollar has come back lower today...

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Stanley’s Orwellian Anti-Fascism

2024-11-15

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2024-11-15

Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. By Jason Stanley. Atria One Step Publishing, 2024; 256 pp.Jason Stanley is a well-regarded philosopher of language, but you would never realize it from this rambling and incoherent book. Stanley rightly says that control of public education is an essential characteristic of fascism. By “fascism,” I should add, he includes Nazism. He also notes that fascists wanted to restrict the...

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Stanley’s Orwellian Anti-Fascism

2024-11-15

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2024-11-15

Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. By Jason Stanley. Atria One Step Publishing, 2024; 256 pp.Jason Stanley is a well-regarded philosopher of language, but you would never realize it from this rambling and incoherent book. Stanley rightly says that control of public education is an essential characteristic of fascism. By “fascism,” I should add, he includes Nazism. He also notes that fascists wanted to restrict the...

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Paul Tudor Jones: I Won’t Own Fixed Income

2024-11-15

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2024-11-15

Paul Tudor Jones recently voiced concerns that rising U.S. deficits and debt and increasing interest rates could lead to a fiscal crisis. His perspective reflects the long-standing fear that sustained borrowing will trigger inflation, raise interest rates, and eventually overwhelm the government’s ability to manage its debt obligations. In short, his thesis is that interest …

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2% CPI Is Here

2024-11-15

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2024-11-15

2% CPI is a headline you won't find in today's Wall Street Journal. The reason is that official inflation gauges, such as CPI, are in the mid to upper 2% range. Last Wednesday, for instance, the year-over-year CPI rate clocked in at 2.6%. We claim inflation is at 2% because we know that 40% of … Continue reading »

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One in nine Swiss invest in crypto assets

2024-11-15

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2024-11-15

One in nine Swiss people invest in crypto assets Keystone-SDA Listen to the article Listening the article Toggle language selector...

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The Context Behind Donald Trump’s “Takeover” of the American Right

2024-11-15

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2024-11-15

What is the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property...

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It’s Greek to Us: Angry Generation Z Women Reenact “Lysistrata” Post-Election

2024-11-15

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2024-11-15

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s decisive victory over Kamala Harris on November 5, millions of American women—especially those of Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, currently aged from 12 to 27—are despondent and dismayed that Democrats’ campaign focus on abortion policy did not convince more voters to choose Harris. They are convinced that their “my body, my choice” freedom has been stolen from them by the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision...

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Totalitarianism Begins With A Denial of Economics

2024-11-14

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2024-11-14

In the history of the social sciences, no other field of study has attracted so great a level of hostility as the science of economics. Since the inception of the science, the onslaught against it has been on the rise, extending across individuals and groups. And the outlook for a favorable reception of the science is bleak, given that a significant number of people are incapable of following through the extended chains of reasoning required for...

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Abolish the Department of Homeland Security

2024-11-14

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2024-11-14

The Trump transition team on Wednesday announced that he is nominating South Dakota governor Kristi Noem as the next head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In the coming weeks, we’ll hear a lot about Noem’s personal politics and origins. We’ll also hear about how the DHS is, as the AP puts it, “one of the biggest government agencies that will be integral to his vow to secure the border and carry out a massive deportation...

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Freedom and Property: Hans-Hermann Hoppe Talks About the Essence of Anarcho-capitalism

2024-11-14

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2024-11-14

What is the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property...

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Elections: Do They Really Matter?

2024-11-14

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2024-11-14

This article is adapted from a speech delivered at the Mises Circle in Fort Myers, Florida on November 9, 2024.The answer to the question posed in the title is: Yes and No. Yes, some elections have made a significant difference but in general, no, they have not. There are many reasons why elections generally no longer make much of a difference in terms of the economy. One is that for the past half century the average reelection rate of incumbents...

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US-Wahl treibt Bitcoin über 90’000 US-Dollar – wie Anleger vom neuen Krypto-Hype profitieren können

2024-11-14

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2024-11-14

<span class="ad-hint ad-hint--right display-block">Werbung Die US-Wahl rückt den Kryptomarkt voll ins Rampenlicht, die Kurse der digitalen Coins ziehen durch die Bank deutlich an, der <a href="https://www.finanzen.ch/devisen/bitcoin-dollar-kurs" title="Bitcoin-Dollar-Kurs">Bitcoin</a> sorgt mit neuem All-Time-High oberhalb 90'000...

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Powell’s Reluctance to Bend Presents an Opportunity to Break the Fed

2024-11-14

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2024-11-14

The democratic mandate of the incoming Trump administration, along with Republican control of Congress and a confrontation of wills between the President-elect and the Federal Reserve Chairman make ending the Fed a bit less unthinkable. Jerome Powell accurately stated, in a slightly defensive tone, that it is not (currently) lawful for a President to fire a Federal Reserve Chairman. Where some see obstacles others see a challenge, and where Powell...

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The Fed&rsquo;s “Temporary” Mortgage-Backed Security Experiment Will Last Decades

2024-11-14

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2024-11-14

It has been nearly 14 years since Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress that the Fed’s emergency quantitative-easing policy, of which the most radical part was buying mortgage-backed securities, was “temporary” and would be “reversed.”  The Fed made huge mortgage-backed securities purchases. The purchases pushed mortgage interest rates to artificially low levels, stoked the second great house price bubble of the 21st century and made...

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The Dollar’s Surge Continues

2024-11-14

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2024-11-14

Overview: The dollar's surge continues. Most G10 currencies are off 0.45%-0.65%. The US dollar is trading above CAD1.40 for the first time since the pandemic, but the Canadian dollar is faring the best of the G10 today (~-0.15%). Since US election, it is the only major currency not to have fallen by at least 2%. All the emerging market currencies are lower today, as well. The greenback is being underpinned by the continued rise in US rates and...

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What Trump’s New Political Appointees Are Telling Us

2024-11-14

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2024-11-14

What is the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property...

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The American Addiction to Transfer Payments

2024-11-14

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2024-11-14

There is plenty of commentary today about continuing large annual US federal budget deficits and the large federal debt that keeps mounting as a result of these relentless deficits. The budget deficit for federal fiscal year 2024 clocked in at $1.8 trillion, representing about 5 percent of US GDP, and the federal debt is now $35.5 trillion, approximately 100 percent of GDP.The Congressional Budget Office projects that annual budget deficits and the...

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Politics and Economics of the Deep State Monopoly

2024-11-14

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2024-11-14

What is the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property...

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