Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

The Federal Reserve’s new report of its balance sheet shows that in the approximately six months ended March 29 it has racked up a remarkable $44 billion of cumulative operating losses. That exceeds its capital of $42 billion, so the capital of the Federal Reserve System has gone negative to the tune of $2 billion—just in time for April Fools’ Day. This event would certainly have surprised generations of Fed chairmen, governors, and, we’d have...

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Last week, Fox News aired a segment discussing the possibility that the US dollar will cease to be the global reserve currency and what that would mean for Americans. The tone of the piece suggested that a “catastrophic” decline of the US dollar was not only possible, but perhaps even imminent. CNN last week also aired its own segment suggesting the US will face “a reckoning like none before” if the “dollar’s dominance” in the global economy falls...

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Access to energy has long been taken for granted as society became quite used to relatively stable prices and the ample abundance of energy. Meanwhile, the business side of energy was relegated to industry insiders, policymakers, and market traders dealing with the matter as a profession. However, the perceptible rise in prices and the fear of supply shortages have pushed energy considerations to the forefront of societal consciousness. This crunch...

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Recently, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a bank that was heavily involved in cryptocurrency, collapsed. Naturally, Democrats want to exploit the situation to rush through new regulations. But that will only make the problem worse. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank, a forty-year old, $200 billion bank, has caused many to worry about the country’s economic stability. Among the concerned is Senator Elizabeth Warren, who wants to reinstate some of the...

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The panopticon is a hypothetical surveillance and control system first imagined by philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century. It’s envisioned as a tool to control the behavior of a large number of people with as little effort as possible. Here is one description: “The panopticon is a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. From the tower, a guard can see...

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Conservatives have been pressuring “the Liberal government to address what they term a violent crime wave, citing the killings of five police officers in five months and a surge of violence in cities across Canada.” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said that violent crime is up 32 percent, gang killings are up 92 percent, and “Police tell us that often they have to arrest the same people multiple times in the very same day because they are...

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“This is all about regulation and the fact that at some point in time there was great advocacy for making sure that the regional banks and the smaller banks didn't have to comply with some of the rules that perhaps would not have allowed them to get into this situation because there would've been stress testing and more oversight and more watching of what was going on.” ~ Rep. Maxine Waters (D), Financial Services Committee, March 15, 2023 As fate...

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