Tom Luongo | The Libertarian Institute

Lunatic With a Plan: Erdogan and Turkey’s Economic Woes

by Tom Luongo | Dec 28, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Since the first assault on Turkey’s finances in 2018, which I wrote about multiple times (here, here, and here), I’ve been the lone voice telling everyone that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a lunatic but he’s a lunatic with a plan. That plan is to de-dollarize the economy of a valuable member of NATO geostrategically. Since the first shots across the bow by the Trump administration at Erdogan’s toying with those powers east of the Bosporus (Russia, China and Iran) the Turkish lira has been the primary mode of attack against Erdogan. Erdogan has pursued what has been deemed unorthodox...

Wall Street Is Setting a Trap For Bitcoin Buyers

by Tom Luongo | Oct 25, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

So Tuesday October 19th, 2021 was supposed to be the day that changed everything for bitcoin. And it may, just not in ways anyone bullish on crypto should be comfortable with. Finally the SEC approved a Bitcoin ETF, the ProShares Bitcoin Futures ETF (BITO) began trading this week to great fanfare in the cryptocurrency community. There was much rejoicing as Bitcoin hit a new all-time high which it has since given back. On the heels of that announcement Valkyrie changed the proposed ticker symbol for its Bitcoin Strategies ETF, another futures-based product, to BTFD. Gotta love the cheek,...

Bitcoin is King

by Tom Luongo | Feb 16, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

Bitcoin is winning. Period. In fact, it may have already won and the people arrayed against it, no matter how powerful, are finally beginning to realize this. This week saw a slew of major announcements which all point in this direction. Of course the big news was Elon Musk’s announcement of Tesla Corp. having a $1.5 billion position in bitcoin. But that news came on the heels of a lot of other news, like VISA saying it was ready to embrace bitcoin to help banks build crypto-payment and trading services. VISA-backed debit cards have been around for a while now, like BitPay’s offering, but...

Bitcoin vs. Wall Street

by Tom Luongo | Dec 14, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles

The big worry among the bitcoin perma-bears is the threat of government ‘making it illegal.’ The latest bogeyman on this front is none other than U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Rumors float that he’s considering outlawing ‘self-custody wallets,’ in effect confiscating the private keys of everyone’s cryptos. In a Twitter-thread, the chief executive [of Coinbase Brian Armstrong] said that his firm “heard rumors” about the US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s plans to introduce fresh rules for “self-custody wallets” by the end of his term. The open nature of cryptocurrencies allows...

Bitcoin is Unbeatable

by Tom Luongo | Aug 25, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are headline news again. DeFi—Decentralized Finance—tokens like LINK and others have exploded in recent weeks, capturing speculators’ imaginations. But more importantly, given the day-to-day fragility of the capital markets and the political reality they reflect, governments are scrutinizing cryptocurrencies harder. From the U.S. to China to Russia, governments are drafting laws and rewriting rules to disadvantage the use of cryptocurrencies. This is the main argument against them by hard money advocates and others who maintain that all that has to happen to...

The Fed and the Road to QTM

by Tom Luongo | Aug 4, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles

Milton Friedman famously said, “Inflation was always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” But Friedman didn’t live through the QE years here in the U.S. and blatantly ignored the twenty plus years of Japanese deflation despite QE and insane levels of money printing during the latter years of his life. Because Friedman, like a lot of modern economists, adhered strictly to the Quantity Theory of Money (QTM). And as an Austrian economics kinda guy I somewhat agree with the QTM. I agree with Ludwig von Mises on this, as you would expect. So, how do we square the QTM with the evidence that QE...

Risk? We don’t Need No Stinking Risk!

by Tom Luongo | Apr 11, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles

We’ve crossed the monetary Rubicon. There is no going back to the way things were. With the creation of a series of Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV) the Treasury Dept. and the Federal Reserve have fundamentally altered the financial landscape of the United States. We are no longer a country that tolerates the risk of capitalism. To be honest, we haven’t been that country for a very long time. Steadily over the course of my life (I was born in 1968 the year the London Gold Pool failed), the global monetary system has cut tie after tie to the discipline of the free market in money. With the U.S....

Now, We Get Local. Now The World Gets Real

by Tom Luongo | Mar 23, 2020 | Featured Articles

"Reality is that which when we stop believing in it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick In March of 2003, we broke ground on the first real thing I ever built, the house I currently live in. Then I understood that there was only one way this economic and political system ended, badly. And I knew then that I was woefully unprepared for the challenge. When I started building my house I could barely drive a nail straight. By the time the first part of it was finished I could lay a square of asphalt shingles with the best of them…. if only until about 10 am or so. I could now solve...