Citibank’s $900 Million Mistake and the Finality of Payments
“Cases like Citbank’s $900 million mispayment and $846,000 bank drafts stuck in financial limbo make for interesting stories. But keep in mind that the participants in these transactions are the accidental victims of a payments system that provides hard finality. What is unseen is the huge amount of trade that the certainty of hard finality facilitates.” ~ J.P. Koning
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The Resilience and Brilliance of the World’s Poorest: The Case of Pagpag
“The problem isn’t that the world’s poorest don’t work hard. The problem is that they work hard in societies where restrictions on economic freedom throttle growth.” ~ Art Carden
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Assar Lindbeck – Sweden’s Greatest Economist Died 90 Years Old
“Lindbeck was a great economist and public voice of economic sanity. He will be sorely missed.” ~ Joakim Book
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Celebrate Entrepreneurs, Don’t Guillotine Them
“The key to getting wealthy in a capitalistic society is to produce something so valuable that millions of people want to trade for it.” ~ Raymond C. Niles
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Where Does Money Come From?
“Money makes possible an incredible amount of interpersonal coordination in the market. Rules of private property and contract, of various kinds, predate money. But widespread market integration and economic growth only result when there is a critical mass of people in a single commercial network linked by money.” ~ Alexander W. Salter
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What Raised the S&P 500 Price-Earnings Ratio?
“For those who find stock price gains inexplicable and therefore terrifying, the Yardeni-Reynolds Model offers a purely empirical explanation of a seemingly high trailing P/E ratio – extremely low global inflation and bond yields combined with an artificially low P/E denominator of past earnings that includes the terrible second quarter of 2020.” ~ Alan Reynolds
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Mandatory Shortages And Concentrated Pain: What “Price Gouging” Laws Do
“Disasters and emergencies are bad enough without policies that make things worse. That’s exactly what price gouging laws are: rules that actually make these worse for the least of these among us by snuffing out the signals that would tell the rest of us precisely what is needed where.” ~ Art Carden
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For-Profit Companies Must be the Backbone of the New Space Age
“Space remains the final frontier. Just as with the terrestrial frontier, private enterprise should be the driving force for exploration, development, and settlement.” ~ David R. Henderson & Alexander W. Salter
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The Myth of the Crowding-Out Myth
“Recognizing that private investment usually works better than public investment does not mean that public investment is never desirable. But it does put the burden of proof on those who champion public investment projects. Rather than offering faux refutations of the crowding-out argument and citing anecdotal evidence, as Skidelsky does, those in favor of a public investment project should make the case for why it is desirable.” ~ William J. Luther & Nicolás Cachanosky
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The Best Virus Response Is Less Government, Not More
“Please ask yourself in your relative comfort just how deep your corona-religion is? Is it so deep that you’ll continue to turn a blind eye to the global suffering that’s taking place so that you can feel safe from a virus that thankfully kills so few? The lives of hundreds of millions of innocent people with exponentially less than you hang on your level of alarmism, and the strange joy you derive from being told what to do.” ~ John Tamny
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Reform the K-12 Government- School Monopoly: Economics and Facts
“The economics and facts support the logic of freeing parents to obtain private education and alternative public education for their children. To further facilitate this decision, parents should be given vouchers and credits equal to the cost of public school in their area, which they can freely use to fund their choice of better education in the private sector.” ~ Gregory van Kipnis
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Vegan Butter and the History of Regulatory Capture
“At any point in time, say at present, the cost of this instrumentalization of regulatory agencies for private purposes appears minimal. After all, only an infinitesimal fraction of the economy is affected. Yet, try picturing a counterfactual America where the regulatory waltz that began in the late 19th century never actually started. How much richer would Americans be today?” ~ Vincent Geloso
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