“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen…” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson 180 years ago. No one can accuse Joe Biden of such foolishness or, if he has his way with History, of being a “little statesman”. He has recently issued a spate of orders designed to re-introduce competition to […]
Reality bites. And at a decidedly inconvenient time for Federal Reserve Board chairman Jay Powell. In a little more than a month he will be meeting with his international peers at their annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He must decide whether to compete for the Banality-of-the-Year Award by repeating that the Fed will continue […]
The good news for President Biden is that the economy added 850,000 jobs in June, allowing him to claim credit for a booming economy, and the “dramatic progress in vaccinating our nation”, which has reduced the number of people too fearful of Covid to look for work from 6 million to 1.6 million. The bad […]
All hail Bernie Sanders. Not, as Republicans claim, because he is about to convert the Democratic Party to Socialism, with the government owning the means of production and distribution. He knows that he can accomplish his goal of having government control the commanding heights of the economy without going through the bothersome process of buying […]
Jay Powell did it. The Fed chairman has been trying to figure out how to warn investors that he can’t keep interest rates at zero forever, or continue indefinitely buying $120 billion of assets every month to pump more paper cash into the economy. Last week he issued just such a warning, without conceding to […]
It is no longer necessary to guess at where President Biden intends to take the country. The only open questions are whether he will be able to scale the political hurdles en route to his destination, and what sort of country America will be should he get there. The road to this new America is […]
IRWIN STELZER ON US ECONOMIC RECOVERY Click to Listen By any metric the US economy has made an impressive recovery following the closures of the past 14 months. Bobby Kerr was joined by US Economist, Business Advisor and Columnist with The Sunday Times, Irwin Stelzer to discuss in more detail. Comments welcome, please feel free […]
Boom. That’s the best one-word summary of the state of the American economy. Later this month or sometime in June the economy will be back to the size it was before the pandemic hit. By year end, it will have made up the growth lost during 2020 and be as large as if China had […]
President Biden appeared before a joint session of Congress last week to announce the largest expansion of the American government since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in 1964-1965, and perhaps the largest ever redistribution of income, wealth and resources from richer – the top 1% – to poorer. The man who campaigned as a moderate is […]
It’s not easy to follow the trillions trail. Here is a road map. Six relief bills have pumped $5.3 newly created fiat money into the economy, equal to about 25% of GDP. The early tranches of this spending reflected a bipartisan view that something had to be done to relieve the distress caused by the […]