Policy

Very powerful self-reinforcing elite networks across politics, civil service, academia, and legacy media telling themselves that the answers to everything are essentially: higher taxes, more state control, ‘trust and support the civil service’, and all alternatives to SW1 consensus are ‘extremist’.

It is true that an increase in gold production can and does generate fluctuations in the price and production structure. However, contrary to the artificial expansion of paper or digital money, an increase of gold is based on production and will not result in an exchange of nothing for something. It will not produce the diversion of wealth from

In Europe, governments account for 40–50% of GDP (higher in France particularly if you include education). In the U.S., it’s higher than reported when you include local government and recent interventions. A century ago, governments were under 15% of GDP, often less than 5%.

Countries –like people– tend to borrow more when they are rich than when they are poor, that is, when they don’t need to borrow, then get into trouble with spiraling financial obligations

What precipitates business cycles is not monetary growth beyond a fixed rate, but inflationary increases of money and credit. Monetary and credit inflation provides a platform for non-productive activities, which consume and add nothing to economic growth. In fact, inflation diverts savings and production toward non-wealth-generating activities,

US Debt level is a national security risk. Columbia Business School’s Pierre Yared’s reveals in a new paper: “A key insight of our model is that financial market factors such as greater debt capacity and a higher war premium can facilitate a hegemon’s rise to power because of the complementarity between military and financial dominance. It

The real challenge facing Social Security is of paying off unfunded liabilities that occurred in the past - that most beneficiaries from 1940 to the present received more in benefits than they paid in taxes, and so the reverse has to happen going forward. That’s just the math.

How does inflation end? Only with pain in the form of a necessary corrective recession or depression. Congress must slash spending, the Fed must stop buying assets and stop tampering with interest rates, and existing US debt must be allowed to mature and roll off the Fed’s balance sheet. We should force the US federal government to sell assets,

The original Trump tax cut and spending expansion pushed up the deficit at a time when the economy did not need a stimulus. The deficit then surged with the first COVID relief bill, but that made sense given the impact of the economic shutdown. By contrast, massive additional stimulus under Biden, when the economy was already rapidly recovering,