In finance, memories are short. The mortgage industry makes out with 50-year paper, the consumer, not so much.

The results of inflation we see everywhere. But, while we try to out-race higher prices with speculation, we never know when the crash will come.

Bankers will be bankers, and AI can only add to their hubris.

The white metal’s price chaos of the last week has many similarities with the 1980 Hunt Brothers’ squeeze.

Argentina’s central bank dipped into its already-depleted reserves to sell more than $1 billion of the US currency over three days to defend the peso.

The gold price is off and running this week. But, money creation isn’t listed as a cause.

Murray Rothbard spoke often in class at UNLV about the “lone nut theory,” questioning if the many political assassins acted alone.

Even in Las Vegas—known for inexpensive fun, food, and gambling—hotel occupancy is 67 percent, visitor traffic is down 6.5 percent from a year ago and 7.4 percent from 2019.

When the President is harping about the Fed lowering the interest rates, this means that he wants more easy money created.

Although President Trump has claimed that tariffs will ultimately raise our standard of living, they really are taxes on consumers. Furthermore, tariffs also deny consumers the choices they want to make.

Although President Trump has claimed that tariffs will ultimately raise our standard of living, they really are taxes on consumers. Furthermore, tariffs also deny consumers the choices they want to make.

No one seems concerned about the constant devaluation of the dollar. They blame high prices on whoever is president or corporate greed.

College professors have suddenly discovered entrepreneurship and are teaching about it in their classes. However, while it is an interesting subject, one cannot teach someone how to be a successful entrepreneur.

College professors have suddenly discovered entrepreneurship and are teaching about it in their classes. However, while it is an interesting subject, one cannot teach someone how to be a successful entrepreneur.

The Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) implemented by central banks during covid continues to provide real world examples of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT).

Government protection and deposit insurance slows the inevitable—until it doesn’t.

The Federal Reserve continues to lose money—$77.6 billion last year according to the Wall Street Journal. The previous year the nation’s central bank lost $114.3 billion. And, there is no end in sight. The Fed is paying 4.4 percent on $3.4 trillion in reserves while earning only 2.6 percent on its securities portfolio. This is a side effect of ZIRP. Two years ago, Thomas L. Hogan wrote in The Hill, “The Fed is bankrupt.” As of January 6, the Fed’s “net worth” was negative $173.5 billion. Yet, the Fed paid out over $1 billion in dividends to its member banks last year. There was no mention of the central bank’s insolvency during last week’s Q&A with Fed Chair Jerome Powell.Hogan explains, “What does the Fed do when its liabilities exceed its assets? It doesn’t go into legal bankruptcy like

Frank Shostak recently wrote that an increase in the supply of gold by itself cannot cause a boom-bust cycle as described by the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT). If that were true, then Austrians would have no explanation for booms and busts prior to central banking.Shostak cites Robert Murphy, who wrote that mined money could enter the loan market and lead to a boom. Believing Murphy is in error, Shostak counters with,Murray Rothbard disagreed with this. He held that increases in the supply of gold could not set in motion the boom-bust cycle. For him, the key reason behind the boom-bust cycle is the act of embezzlement brought about by the expansionary monetary policy of the central bank, which sets in motion an increase in the money supply out of “thin air.”Later, he again put

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”―George Orwell, Animal FarmThe nation’s deposit insurer (FDIC) let slip the other day which large depositors were bailed out when Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed last spring. SVB banked the nation’s tech illuminate.Its failure exposed fractional reserve banking’s Achilles heel when a bank run was initiated via social media and carried out with depositors moving money on their cell phone apps. The bank’s assets were primarily government or government-backed securities, unfortunately purchased when interest rates were near zero.Fortune.com reports:A document from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which the agency said it mistakenly released unredacted in response to a Bloomberg News Freedom of Information Act request,

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 order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

Both presidential campaigns are making outlandish promises in the waning hours before election day. Kamala Harris claims she will stop corporate price gouging with government force. The legislative mechanics of how she would do this are unknown. Prices distribute goods. A high price is a signal that more of that particular good should be produced. Increases in the level of all prices is caused by inflation of the money supply. Price inflation indicates a drop in the purchasing power of money. Murray Rothbard explains what will result with Harris price controls:Economic theory tells us the myriad evils that stem from any attempt at price controls of goods and services. Maximum price controls lead to artificially created shortages of the product; mini- mum controls lead to artificial unsold

Normal folks rejoiced when the Federal Reserve lowered the only interest rate it controls, Fed Funds, by a surprise 50 basis points. However, since then, the rate on 10-year bonds has increased 70 basis points. Focusing on the positive, Almost Daily Grant’s (ADG) reports “An outbreak of optimism has taken hold across the land, as the Conference Board’s monthly gauge of consumer sentiment painted a pretty picture for the economy and asset prices alike.”The proportion of consumers anticipating a recession over the next 12 months dropped to its lowest level since the question was first asked in July 2022, as did the percentage of consumers believing the economy was already in recession. Consumers’ assessments of their Family’s Current Financial Situation were unchanged, but optimism for the

The Wall Street Journal recently reported, “Trump’s crypto campaign echoes some other presidential candidates who have dedicated themselves to specific fiscal policies. Much of William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 campaign was a protest of the gold standard. After taking office, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an order restricting the private use of gold. Ron Paul’s 2008 campaign assailed the Federal Reserve.”With apologies to Lloyd Benson, “I know Ron Paul, and Donald Trump, you are no Ron Paul.” Dr. Paul is famous for his grilling of Federal Reserve Chairman while in office. As a student of Austrian economics and friend of Murray Rothbard, he has always understood that the central bank creates inflation, not the opposite as they claim. Paul has said “we are in the process of a failing dollar….

Austrian Business Cycle Theory tells us that recessions are an indication an economy is healing. Booms created by government printing presses and fiscal interventions will be cleansed by downward reset of asset prices and labor misappropriation will be righted by rising unemployment. Murray Rothbard wrote in America’s Great Depression, “The adjustment process consists in rapid liquidation of the wasteful investments. Some of these will be abandoned altogether (like the Western ghost towns constructed in the boom of 1816–1818 and deserted during the Panic of 1819); others will be shifted to other uses.”The Chinese economy is experiencing just such a depression and the authorities in command and control China met this weekend and are going to abort the cleanse and

My friends at AARP were the first to let me know that my monthly stipend from taxpayers by way of Uncle Sam will increase by 2.5% beginning in January. The retiree advocate gives some laughable context, “The 2025 cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) is the lowest since 2021, reflecting a continued cooling of inflation following a surge in consumer prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.”Rob Williams, managing director of financial planning at Charles Schwab, told AARP, “Some may feel the increase for 2025 is low relative to the inflation they feel in their pocketbooks,” Williams says. “Still, it’s a welcome increase that builds on a 5.9 percent increase in payments in 2022, 8.7 percent in 2023 and 3.2 percent this year.” This week’s CPI reading remained higher than the securities markets were

Sabrina Carpenter has been a star since she was 12, staring on Disney’s Girl Meets World. Now she’s a singer and, I’ve heard, she has broken records set by the Beatles. She’s recorded a catchy cover of Nancy Sinatra‘s 1965 hit “These Boots Are Made For Walking.”  ”I want to feel as confident as humanly possible so I can be up there and not worry about what I’m doing,” Carpenter says. “It helps me perform better.” She ended up donning custom Swarovski-crystal minidresses by the Ukrainian brand Frolov, a favorite of Beyoncé for her own shows. She paired the dresses with her signature white go-go boots. “The go-go boots have been there for me in hard times,” she says. The 1960’s footwear fashion statement are suddenly popular again.To any economics student, go-go boots and the year 1965 mean

The malinvestments generated by the government’s response to COVID continue to be revealed with time and higher interest rates. What seemed like a good idea at the time—with low interest rates and the threat of a future of mutating viruses—was the building of life-sciences buildings. Paul Cwik writes in his new book Austrian Business Cycle An Introduction, “Entrepreneurs engage in ventures that are built upon the temporary stimulative credit injections.” In less academic terms, “A lot of people just threw money in stupidly,” Joel Marcus—executive chairman and founder of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, one of the largest owners of life-sciences property in the US—told the Wall Street Journal’s Peter Grant, progeny of Jim Grant. Grant explains,When the pandemic hit, developers moved at warp

Luke Gromen told Dale Pinkert on the Forex Analytics F.A.C.E. Show July 22nd that the U.S. went to China last fall and asked the Chinese to strengthen the yuan. The Chinese said if the United States wants a weaker dollar they need to let it go versus gold, implying that the gold market is influenced by the government’s hand.Pinkert, being a currency trader, expressed concern that the dollar could be devalued overnight by government fiat, and asked how the executive branch could engineer such a devaluation. Groman matter-of-factly pointed to Section 2.10 of the Financial Accounting Manual of the Federal Reserve Banks and said the President could tell the Treasury Secretary to tell the chairman of the Federal Reserve to remonetize gold.Indeed, the first paragraph of Section 2.10 reads,“The

Luke Gromen told Dale Pinkert on the Forex Analytics F.A.C.E. Show July 22nd that the U.S. went to China last fall and asked the Chinese to strengthen the yuan. The Chinese said if the United States wants a weaker dollar they need to let it go versus gold, implying that the gold market is influenced by the government’s hand.Pinkert, being a currency trader, expressed concern that the dollar could be devalued overnight by government fiat, and asked how the executive branch could engineer such a devaluation. Groman matter-of-factly pointed to Section 2.10 of the Financial Accounting Manual of the Federal Reserve Banks and said the President could tell the Treasury Secretary to tell the chairman of the Federal Reserve to remonetize gold.Indeed, the first paragraph of Section 2.10 reads,“The

Thousands of travelers are stuck at airports this weekend due to “an outside vendor technology issue” Delta said Sunday, CNN reports. “The issue extended beyond airports, with businesses, government agencies, health and emergency services, banks, schools and universities around the world grinding to a halt or seeing services disrupted due to a flawed software update for Microsoft Windows operating systems issued by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike,” experts told CNN. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that half of major banks have an inadequate grasp of a broad swath of potential risks from cyber attacks to employee blunders. “In the confidential assessments, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said 11 of the 22 large banks it supervises have ‘insufficient’ or ‘weak’ management of

Uncle Sam has stopped lending a helping hand and now repo men are back in business. Repos for the first half of 2024 are up 23% from a year ago. Higher-for-longer interest rates mean new car loans average 7.3% and used car loans average 11.5% putting stress on consumer pocketbooks. However, Claire Ballentine wrote in Bloomberg of something all too familiar. “Lenders are eager to make loans, even with the risk that the borrower might not be able to make the payments. That’s because car loans, like home mortgages, can be sliced up into bonds and sold to investment firms, hedge funds and other investors.”Monthly bills are now average $739 for a new car and $549 for a used car. Three missed payments and the repo man is summoned. And seizures are easier than ever with “technological

With $1.2 billion in commercial real estate property loans coming due by the end of 2025, property owners are scrambling for sources of refinance. Add to that, according to a May report from the Kroll Bond Rating Agency nearly one-third of office commercial mortgage backed securities (CMBS) are distressed. The volume of distressed CMBS office loans has doubled from a year ago, increasing to a combined $52.2B in March, compared to $26.6B a year ago. In multi-family, a total of $525B in loans on more than 58,000 properties will mature by the end of 2029, according to a report from Yardi Matrix earlier this year.In its special report on the aging of appraisers, Bisnow’s Ryan Wangman wrote, “With this tidal wave of maturing and distressed loans, appraisers will play a key role in setting the

The market always seems to teach retail investors a lesson. Bloomberg reported leveraged EFTs such as The Direxion Daily Semiconductors Bull 3x Shares (ticker SOXL), which delivers triple the daily move of the NYSE Semiconductor Index, took in a record 1.5 billion last week, only to drop “15% Wednesday to extend a 37% loss in the past 14 days.”“The $23 billion ProShares UltraPro QQQ (TQQQ) and the $4 billion ProShares UltraPro S&P 500 (UPRO) fell nearly 7% and 11%, respectively, after taking in a cumulative inflow of about $650 million last week,” Denitsa Tsekova and Isabelle Lee reported. “There is a natural tendency for people to want to be part of a group or crowd,” writes Martha Stokes, Chartered Market Technician. But, “Retail investors will always lose money because they lack the

My wife often poses the joke “Do you know the difference between doctors and God?” with the punchline being “God doesn’t think he’s a doctor.” The atrocious behavior of my neurosurgeon made me wonder: How does anyone get away with acting like this?In part one of my deep brain stimulation to fix the tremors in my hands, two holes are drilled into my skull while my head was secured in place by a metal cage with a plexiglass box fitted over it. I was sedated to a level where I was awake but didn’t feel any pain when the drill bit went through my skull, although I could hear it—a sound indescribable yet at the same time unforgettable.What I also heard was the surgeon continually yelling at the staff, “What I want you to do is just stand there and not move. There is not a thing you can do for

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 order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

When something valuable is mispriced at say zero, speculators appear to grease the wheels of commerce while earning a little something for themselves. This is all well and good until the government steps in to put a stop to the speculator’s arbitrage. The real issue is, “There were just too many diners for too few restaurants,” Appointment Trader founder Jonas Frey told Bloomberg. “I believe we’re serving a need. That’s why it worked.” A thriving market for New York restaurant reservations has turned into a mania, evidenced by the 30,000 people who have flocked to Frey’s site to buy reservations at some of the city’s hottest dining spots for $250 to $1,000 a seat. His platform has sold over $6 million in reservations over the past year, according to its website. However, in a case of

Price discovery in commercial real estate, which had been frozen while sellers insisted on prices from the good ol’ ZIRP days, is starting to thaw. Real Estate giant Related Companies has unloaded the property at 321 W. 44th St., New York, New York for less than $50 million, reports Bloomberg. 

For lending, as in all things, necessity is the mother of invention. No matter the rate, lenders want to lend and borrowers want to borrow, with both sides tending to overdo it. The Wall Street Journal reports that the newest collateral thing is the AI chip.

More than half a trillion dollars in losses. A trillion is a thousand billion. The latest from the nation’s deposit insurer, the FDIC, is “Unrealized losses on available-for-sale and held-to-maturity securities increased by $39 billion to $517 billion in the first quarter.”The Federal Reserve’s higher for longer policy is making bank balance sheets weaker and weaker. Bond values decrease when interest rates increase. Thus, “Higher unrealized losses on residential mortgage-backed securities, resulting from higher mortgage rates in the first quarter, drove the overall increase. This is the ninth straight quarter of unusually high unrealized losses since the Federal Reserve began to raise interest rates in the first quarter of 2022.“The number of banks on the problem list rose in this year’s

I heard a rumor the other day that Democrats are throwing the Presidential election. Party apparatchiks believe the stock market will crash, sinking the economy and they would rather have it all implode on Donald Trump’s watch, paving the way for having a Democrat in the White House from 2028 until eternity. This sort of conspiracy theory seemed spectacularly implausible until I read in the New York Times, that anti-Trump Republicans believe the Biden campaign is ghosting them. “Some Republicans blame the Biden campaign, saying they’ve heard practically nothing from an operation they think could use their help. And they worry that the omission represents a broader failure to bring moderate Republicans into the fold.”Susan Molanari told the NYT’s Jess Bidgood, “I’m concerned about the state

Construction lending juggernaut Bank OZK made news when its shares fell 17% after Citigroup analyst Benjamin Gerlinger wrote in a report that cut his rating to “sell.” Bloomberg reported “Bank OZK faces ‘largely idiosyncratic’ exposure to life sciences relative to peer banks,” with a $915 million loan on the Research and Development District on San Diego’s waterfront, developed by IQHQ Inc..“RaDD has been in development for more than 4 years and we believe 0% of the 1.7 million square feet is leased — indicative of a difficult life science construction lending market,” Gerlinger wrote.“Supply has outpaced demand across markets, putting leverage back in tenants’ hands and allowing start-ups to push for shorter terms,” JLL researchers led by Maddie Holmes, Amber Schiada and Mark Bruso wrote

Stock market technicians are musing that if meme stocks are surging the Fed is not tight enough. Yes, after three years of hibernation “Roaring Kitty” returned with the first of a series of cryptic posts on X. Keith Gill’s (aka Roaring Kitty) post showed a man leaning forward with what looked like a gaming controller. Some traders interpreted it to mean Gill is coming back, according to Bloomberg. Gill rallied day traders on Reddit in an effort to squeeze GameStop short sellers and “reportedly turned a $58,000 options outlay into a $50 million windfall during the initial 2021-era meme stonk frenzy,” reports Almost Daily Grant’s. Needing no other excuses, punters have sent shares of GameStop and AMC soaring. A Bloomberg Markets Live Pulse survey just revealed that a third of responders

In the currency playground, the United States is the world’s biggest bully. With the world’s reserve currency Uncle Sam doesn’t use the dollar for diplomacy but for destruction. Responding to Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. “responded with an extraordinary amount of sanctions and cutting off Russia from the dollar-based system in almost every way imaginable,” Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal said on the Odd Lots podcast.It was Woodrow Wilson’s theory that sanctions are a “peaceful, silent, deadly remedy” against recalcitrant foreigners that replace the “need for force.” But, as Justin Raimondo explained “the slow death of economic strangulation can so degrade an entire people that they are reduced to a pre-civilizational state, modern savages living at a subsistence level.”China

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 order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

If you’re wondering why you should buy gold or worry about a financial meltdown I have two words for you: Jared Bernstein. He is the Chief Economist for Joe Biden. In a clip from an upcoming documentary “Finding the Money” Bernstein is asked about the federal government’s borrowing process and he stumbles and bumbles, saying “The US government can’t go bankrupt because we can print our own money.” It gets worse from there.”They print the dollars so why does the government even borrow?” the interviewer asks.“Well, some of the language is just confusing. The government definitely prints its own money. The government definitely prints money and lends that money. The government definitely prints money,” Bernstein rambled repeatedly, unable to articulate the basic concepts.“It

Those who have declared residency in another state cannot spend even a minute beyond the allowed time in either high tax New York or California. And, Big Brother is watching. George Orwell could not conjure up a more diabolical tale than the Bloomberg story penned by Laura Nahmias and Eliyahu Kamisher.“The minute you file a partial return you’re going to hear from New York state,” said Jonathan Mariner, who created TaxDay, an app that tracks users’ locations so they don’t overstay the threshold of days that would trigger residency status, which is typically 184 (for irony, slip a nine in after the one).So for the really rich, a misplaced day in New York (or on the other coast, California) can mean millions lost to the tax authority. How serious is this? Nahmias and Kamisher write, “State

Those who have declared residency in another state cannot spend even a minute beyond the allowed time in either high tax New York or California. And, Big Brother is watching. George Orwell could not conger up a more diabolical tale than the Bloomberg story penned by Laura Nahmias and Eliyahu Kamisher.“The minute you file a partial return you’re going to hear from New York state,” said Jonathan Mariner, who created TaxDay, an app that tracks users’ locations so they don’t overstay the threshold of days that would trigger residency status, which is typically 184 (for irony, slip a 9 in after the one).So, for the really rich a misplaced day in New York (or on the other coast, California) can mean millions lost to the tax authority. How serious is this? Nahmias and Kamisher write, “state

Economics trumps sentimentality, and gold’s elevated price has some people raiding the family jewelry box to pay bills. “Young people are not wearing grandma’s jewels. Most of the young people, they want an Apple watch. They don’t want a pocket watch,” Tobina Kahn, president of House of Kahn Estate Jewelers told Bloomberg. “Sentimental is now out the door.”When times are tough, treasures change hands, the late Burt Blumert, once a gold dealer and Mises Institute Board Chairman, used to say. “Prices are high, and I need cash,” Branden Sabino, a thirty-year-old information technology worker said, adding that with the cost of rent, groceries, and car insurance rising, he doesn’t have any savings. He sold a gold necklace and a gold ring to King Gold and Pawn on Avenue 5 in Brooklyn. “People

When the latest CPI number came in hot at 0.4% for March and the annual core CPI inflation rate held at 3.8%, Betsey Stevenson, professor of economics at the University of Michigan appearing on CNBC’s Squawk Box said nonchalantly “Three percent inflation is no big deal.”

Day-to-day we don’t hear much about the commercial office property crash. As The Fed’s Michael Barr said at an event hosted by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition in Washington, “This is the kind of thing where it’s likely to be a very slow-moving train as the financial sector and commercial real estate market move forward,” he said, adding that refinancing deals will play out in the next few years. “It’ll take some time.”Barr, the vice chair for supervision said “There are pockets of risks in the system. We’re looking at things like, what’s the level of unrealized losses on the balance sheet from securities? We’re looking at banks that have particular kinds of concentration in commercial real estate.” Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com, citing Trepp, reports the delinquency rate of

In a few short weeks since SEC approval Inflows into Bitcoin ETF funds had reached just over $59 billion on Good Friday, according to btcetffundflow.com. Meanwhile the unloved and disrespected GLD [gold] ETF holds $54 billion, despite its thousand year pedigree. Gold fan and crypto disser Peter Schiff debated crypto evangelist Raoul Pal on Real Vision for nearly three hours with neither combatant giving an inch. The calm Mr. Pal is the co-founder of Real Vision, a Goldman Sachs alum, and proudly says he is “irresponsibly long” Bitcoin and other cryptos. The dogmatic Schiff did numerous turns on the financial talking heads circuit post ‘08 crash and is the son of famous income tax protester Irwin Schiff.Both agree the U.S. government has borrowed its way into disaster with the only way out

Yeah, the other night I laid sleeping And I woke from a terrible dream So I caught up my pal Jack Daniel’s And his partner Jimmy Beam And we drank alone, yeah With nobody else Yeah, you know when I drink alone I prefer to be by myself ~George ThorogoodI poured hundreds of “Jack and Cokes” when I tended bar from the late 70’s to mid 80’s. It was beyond me how anyone could tell the difference between Jack Daniels Old No. 7 and anything else when mixed with coke or whatever carbonated cola was coming out of the gun. Turns out Dr. Fauci and the Center for Disease Control did Brown-Forman, the makers of Jack, a solid by shutting down America and cooping everyone up. More than some whiled away the hours with their old pal Jack Daniels. People may have had to work from home, but without the boss

Followers of the Austrian school of economics know that the term inflation refers to increasing the quantity of money or money substitutes. The result being a rise in the price of goods and services or a fall in the value of money. But, in the modern era, this rise in prices is called inflation and as Ludwig von Mises wrote, “This semantic innovation is by no means harmless.” The semantic change has people looking everywhere but where they should to blame for higher prices.Bloomberg’s Enda Curran writes, “A prolonged period of elevated inflation has left consumers cranky and eager to cast blame.” With the term inflation evidently getting tiresome, Curren lists some new price increase buzzwords and phrases.“Shrinkflation” This is the President’s favorite. He even mentioned it in his State

Pattie Boyd, British fashion model and muse to two rock superstars, George Harrison and Eric Clapton, engaged Christie’s to auction love letters from Harrison and Clapton in addition to other memorabilia. As with all other assets these days, Boyd’s bounty went for boom-time prices. Chron.com reports, “Christie’s, the world-renowned auction house, said its online sale of The Pattie Boyd Collection sold for around 2.82 million pounds ($3.6 million), or more than seven times the pre-sale high estimate of around 380,000 pounds.” The auction included two love letters from Clapton, written while Boyd was married to the unattentive Harrison. Making up the bulk of the auction proceeds was the original cover artwork for Derek and The Dominos’ 1970 album “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.” The

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For lower income folks the landing is already hard. Chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab Liz Ann Sonders posted on X (and reported by Almost Daily Grant’s) that the tally of domestic temporary help employees slipped to a three-plus-year low of 2.748 million down from 3.181 million as of March 2022. The 14% comes in 4th in the category’s downward drops percentage-wise since 1990; to the early 2000s, the 2008 financial crash and the Covid debacle, each coinciding with a recession. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reports nationwide layoffs totaled 84,638 last month, the largest February sum since 2009. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Survey of Consumer Expectations for February finds that respondents give themselves a 14.5% chance of being let go from their jobs

One would guess the folly of rent control regulations needn’t be explained any further. If rents are held in place by government edict, landlords have no incentive to maintain apartment units to attract renters, the housing stock ultimately deteriorates, and homelessness increases.

Further evidence of the crash in office property values comes from news that the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) with $436.9 billion in capital sold its 29% stake in Manhattan’s 360 Park Avenue South for $1 to its partner Boston Properties Inc., which agreed to assume CPPIC’s share of the property’s debt. It was only in the third quarter of 2022, CPPIB committed $83.6 million as part of a tri-party venture with Boston Properties and GIC to acquire the 20-story office building. The pension fund spent $71 million on the project but bailed for a buck (+debt) when required to pony up another $46 million. CPPIB wasn’t done selling. The investment board sold a 45% stake in Santa Monica Business Park for $38 million, a discount of 75% to what CPPIB paid in 2018. Again, the pension

Something’s rotten under the Las Vegas Convention Center and it turns out it’s a chemical sludge with the “consistency of a milkshake,” reports Bloomberg Businessweek. This sludge is a byproduct of Elon Musk’s Boring Company tunneling from the Las Vegas Convention Center to the Encore and Westgate hotels. These tunnels don’t feature rapid transit but instead individual Teslas ferrying carloads of convention goers at just 40 mph. Workers are being burned by the sludge and the Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is investigating. Bloomberg Businessweek obtained a copy of the report under the Freedom of Information Act.Leaving aside the worker safety issue, Musk has been, shall we say, aspirational about the Boring Company’s prospects for tunneling underground, which

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Mises Institute is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Contributions are tax-deductible to the full extent the law allows. Tax ID# 52-1263436

The number of U.S. commercial foreclosures spiked to 635 in January 2024 from a low of 141 in May 2020 reports real estate data firm ATTOM.

Prices will always increase, some small banks will fail, and the Fed was asleep at the switch when the run on Silicon Valley Bank occurred. Fed chair Jerome Powell admitted those three things in response to Scott Pelley’s questions on 60 Minutes.
“But the overall price level doesn’t come down. It will fluctuate. And some . . . goods and services will go up, others will go down. But overall, in aggregate, the price level doesn’t tend to go down except in fairly extreme circumstances,” Powell said.
Of course, what Powell is referring to doesn’t exist. Murray Rothbard wrote,
There is no such thing as a single, scientific index of the movement of general prices. All such indexes are strictly arbitrary, and there are a huge number of possible indexes, all of which create insuperable economic

Prices will always increase, some small banks will fail, and the Fed was asleep at the switch when the run on Silicon Valley Bank occurred. Fed chair Jerome Powell admitted those three things in response to Scott Pelley’s questions on 60 Minutes.
“But the overall price level doesn’t come down. It will fluctuate. And some . . . goods and services will go up, others will go down. But overall, in aggregate, the price level doesn’t tend to go down except in fairly extreme circumstances,” Powell said.
Of course, what Powell is referring to doesn’t exist. Murray Rothbard wrote,
There is no such thing as a single, scientific index of the movement of general prices. All such indexes are strictly arbitrary, and there are a huge number of possible indexes, all of which create insuperable economic

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