The 4.2 percent Consumer Price Index (CPI) bounce for April sent a chill through some traders and financial commentators who had expected a tamer number like a 3.6 or 3.9 percent from last year’s covid price level air pocket. The MarketWatch headline screamed, “U.S. Inflation Soars in April to Thirteen-Year High, CPI Shows, and Reveals Fresh
“If the market continues to see wild swings based on Elon Musk tweets, it’s going to be a big setback for this asset class,” Matt Maley, chief market strategist for Miller Tabak + Co. told Bloomberg . “The fact that it sees such wild swings to the tweets from one person takes away the legitimacy of the asset class.” Reminds a bit of a financial
This spring Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes asked Fed chair Jerome Powell, “And you believe the system, because of the oversight of the Fed, has the wherewithal to stand a significant shock to the markets?” After pointing out that the markets survived a 25 percent drop in GDP and the loss of 30 million jobs last covid spring, Powell admitted
Bloomberg uses the price of a certain bike, the Santa Cruz Hightower C R, to make the case that price inflation is upon us. This bike will set you back $4,749, a 10 percent leap from the first of the year. By the way, I have three bikes for sale on OfferUp, each priced at less than 10 percent of the fancy Hightower. No one even wants to negotiate.
The nation’s billionaires are catching plenty of grief for profiting from the pandemic. All they are guilty of is providing services people wish to pay for. Nothing wrong with that. Then there are the mortgage companies. It turns out they are turning a good profit off Uncle Sam’s forced forbearance plan. Ben Eisen writes for the Wall Street
The Fed announced the reportedly hawkish news that the central bank may raise rates, not this year, not next year, but by fifty basis points sometime in 2023. This tapering would slow the Fed’s buying of $120 billion of debt securities a month with money created from the ether to some lesser amount. People forget the central bank “kept its
Google reported in April that the search question “When is the housing market going to crash?” had spiked 2,450 percent in the past month, according to Diana Olick of CNBC . “Why is the market so hot?” searches had doubled in just a week. Since 2008, everyone has been on bubble watch. The price of anything goes up, for any sort of reason, and it’s
An insider confided to a friend that all he is doing right now is transaction work for real estate holders who are selling now before the market crashes. His clients, members of Sin City’s illuminati, once bitten by the ‘08 crash, believe they’ll beat the crowd to the sales window before the local retail and office market collapses. Tiny
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Or tyrannical men do tyrannical things when it comes to propping up paper money whose value is circling the drain. The Financial Times headline screams, “Turkey to Target ‘Under the Mattress’ Gold in Effort to Bolster the Lira.” This in the same week that “[n]ewly appointed Turkish finance minister
Describing attorney Clarence Darrow, the great H.L. Mencken wrote, “The marks of battle are all over his face. He has been through more wars than a whole regiment of Pershings. And most of them have been struggles to the death, without codes or quarter.” Darrow is mostly a forgotten libertarian, unknown to the new generation. The Mises Institute
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.