economics

The U.S. wasn’t alone in having lots of steel but comparatively few alloying materials. “The four leading steelmaking countries in the world,” Konkel writes, “the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and France—accounted for 90 percent of the world’s steel production, but perhaps only 1 to 2 percent of the world’s manganese.” Most of the world’s

Vannevar Bush, who ran the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, controversially suggested the medical advances that came about from the war—most notably the production and use of antibiotics—may have saved more lives than were lost during the war.

Back during the March 2020 sharp stock market crash, investors initially fled into bonds as one would expect in a risk-off crisis, meaning that bond yields went down and bond prices went up. But then as the dollar index spiked, the crisis became bad enough that there became a large number of forced sellers of bonds in order to get dollars and

The first is to assume that any nominal increase in the value of the currency is equal to a real increase. It isn’t. Since 2005 productivity has grown faster in China than in the United States, so the renminbi would have to rise by that differential—several percent annually—just to maintain its real relative value.

There’s a classic Phil Knight (co-founder and former CEO of Nike) quote that goes something like, “everyone was looking for the next Michael Jordan on the basketball court, but he was walking down the fairway.” In other words, everyone was wondering who the next generationally dominant basketball player would be, assuming that would be the next big

The Eurodollar market was the name given to the market surrounding the dollar accumulation in the banking system outside the United States during the “dollar glut” period of low U.S. interest rates in the 1960s.

Then everything broke with the doubleheader Depression and war. In 1943 Franklin Roosevelt effectively capped incomes at the equivalent of $400,000 per year, with everything above that taxed at 94 percent. He was reelected in a landslide the next year.

And they tend to approximately rotate together. Decades where American growth stocks do well and the dollar is strong tend to be the decades where value stocks, emerging market stocks, and gold/commodities collectively underperform. And then when an asset rotation occurs, American growth stocks (which at that point are quite expensive along with a

Same with the Reagan revolution. Almost 80 percent of Americans had high trust in the government in 1964. Then the 1970s happened. Years of high inflation and high unemployment meant Americans were ready to listen to a politician who said the government was the cause of their problems, not the solution. The big takeaway here is that we really have