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Tag Archives: Featured

Is gold an inflation hedge?

Jeff Deist and Ben Nadelstein discuss narratives surrounding the merits of gold ownership. Is gold an inflation hedge, store of value, or a safe haven asset? The episode ends with questions regarding gold’s monetary premium and the different types of inflation. Connect with Jeff and Monetary Metals on X: @JeffDeist @Monetary_Metals [embedded content] Additional Resources Start Earning Interest on Gold The Case for Gold Yield in an Investment Portfolio How NOT to...

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Why Politicians and Bureaucrats Choose Politics over Sound Economics

We are taught from a very young age; “Government works for you”, or “the Government is the embodiment of the populous.” We accept these slogans blindly and carry on day to day. However, reality does not match up with these catch phrases. This is painfully clear when looking at the incentives that face these officeholders. After examining just a few, it’s clear we ought to adopt slogans that align with reality like, “the Government works for themselves.”The Big...

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The Non-Austrian Theory of the Nonbusiness Cycle

The Prophets of Doomby Neema ParviniImprint Academic, 2023; 227 pp.It was to be expected that Neema Parvini would give us an excellent book, and he has not disappointed us. Parvini is an outstanding Shakespeare critic and has written an important book on property rights, The Defenders of Liberty. In The Prophets of Doom, he discusses with marvelous concision a number of thinkers who have rejected the notion of universal historical progress, advocating instead a...

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Where We Stand

I am on vacation, and then on a business trip that will interrupt the commentary until the weekly note on April 30. The May monthly analysis will be published the following week after the FOMC meeting and April employment report. I wanted to weigh in on a few key market issues before leaving. New Divergence: The continued robust US jobs growth (276k average in Q1 24 and 251k average in 2023) and above-trend growth allow the Federal Reserve to remain focused on...

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Immigration And Its Impact On Employment

Is immigration why employment reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) continue defying mainstream economists’ estimates? Many are asking this question as the U.S. experiences a flood of immigrants across the southern border. Concurrently, many young college graduates continue to complain about the inability to receive a job offer. As noted recently by CNBC: The job market looks solid on paper. According to government data, U.S. employers added 2.7...

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Savor the Taste of Independence, Grow Your Own!

Growing your own tomatoes can be rewarding far beyond the sweet taste of your crop.The traditional extra benefits keep bringing many of us back season after season. If you’re a gardener, you know the great feeling of acting directly on nature to produce the food you eat. Raising tomatoes gets you outside and sweating, and usually provides a sense of accomplishment. It encourages discipline and planning and demands a bit of knowledge and a ton of patience.And when you...

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Sound Money Vs. Fiat Currency: Trade and Credit Are the Wild Cards

We need to start thinking outside the current system, which has no solutions. Our convictions about money are quasi-religious: heretics are burned at the stake. I'm not sure which stake I'll be tied to, because all the conventional choices--fiat currency, sound money (gold, Bitcoin) or debt-free currency (a.k.a. MMT)--are all fatally flawed. To understand why, consider the wild cards in any monetary system: global trade and credit. Let's start with credit, which...

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Milei Tries to Tackle Rent Control in Argentina

The major cities of the world have been facing housing problems for years. With the increase of immigrants and of people experiencing homelessness, the discussion about housing regulation has intensified.The West, once a bastion of ideas of freedom and free markets, continues to harbor central planners whose delusions of omnipotence are paid for by the misfortune of ordinary people as the regulation attempts of these planners fail because such rental laws were not...

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The Population Explosion Disaster that Never Happened

I do not hear much talk about world population these days, the way I did growing up in the 1960s and ’70s. People were supposedly starving, dying, with tens of millions more sure to die. The problem back then was that there were just too many, well, people.Population numbers coming out of China and India were unthinkable, and projections indicated many more people were going to be born into this dire situation. There were over twenty thousand people in my hometown...

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