In response to the potential economic downturn in the economy arising from the spread of the Coronavirus, the Federal Reserve dropped the federal funds rate by half a point — to a range of 1% to 1.25%. Ironically, after the Fed’s announcement, the stock market dropped...
Economics
The Fed Slashes Rates as Powell Declares Economy ‘Strong’
by Ryan McMaken | Mar 3, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles
The Federal Reserve moved to an enact an emergency interest rate cut after officials saw the coronavirus having a material impact on the economic outlook, Chairman Jerome Powell said Tuesday.Powell held a news conference following the central bank’s decision to cut...
The “F” Word
by Bradley Thomas | Mar 2, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles, Politics
There’s a four letter word beginning with ‘f’ that’s on a lot of people’s lips these days. I’m talking about “free.” Free just might be the most powerful word in the English language. It drastically alters people’s behaviors and can short-circuit mental reasoning like...
Data Don’t Speak for Themselves
by Matt Knight | Feb 28, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics
Check out this graph, data for which were drawn from the USDA and CDC: With a correlation coefficient of about -0.94, these data indicate that for the decade 2000-2009 there was a strong inverse relationship between per capita consumption of beef and the number of...
Physics and the Economic Calculation Problem
by Logan Chipkin | Feb 27, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles
Throughout the nineteenth century, economic socialism was given its intellectual foundations by the Utopian Socialists such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, and by the ‘Scientific’ Socialists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Austrian economics was only founded in...
The WTO Is Both Irrelevant and Unnecessary
by Ryan McMaken | Feb 26, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is in a state of crisis. Despite grandiose dreams of a global trade organization that would enforce global bureaucrats' broad vision for multilateral trade agreements, the world looks more and more like it neither wants nor needs an...
Trump’s Budget: More Warfare, Slightly Less Welfare
by Ron Paul | Feb 20, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles
Listening to the howls from Democrats and the applause from Republicans, one would think President Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2021 budget is a radical assault on the welfare state. The truth is that the budget contains some minor spending cuts, most of which are not...
Another Massive Budget Deficit to Start 2020
by Michael Maharrey | Feb 19, 2020 | Economics, Featured Articles
The Trump administration posted another massive budget deficit to start out calendar-year 2020. According to the latest data released by the U.S. Treasury Department, Uncle Sam spent $32.6 billion more than it took in last month. That compares with an $8.7 billion...