It’s the time of the year when families gather and reminisce on what they are thankful for. Unfortunately, the message of Thanksgiving has become a clichéd sentimentality in our culture of surface-level entertainment. Still, it’s one worth revisiting from time
What the media calls a “currency war”, whereby nations engage in competitive currency devaluations in order to increase exports, is really “currency suicide”. They engage in the fallacious belief that weakening one’s own currency will improve their products’ competitiveness in
Today, Black Friday, millions of Americans are lining up at stores to get the bargains they have waited a year for. Many Canadians are probably also making the trek across the border to partake in this now great tradition. In
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From today’s Open Europe news summary: In its latest financial stability report, released yesterday, the ECB warned of potential volatility and stress on global financial markets from the US Federal Reserve’s decision to taper. The ECB also warned that banks’
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Reprinted from The Independent Institute Feast and football. That’s what many of us think about at Thanksgiving. Most people identify the origin of the holiday with the Pilgrims’ first bountiful harvest. But few understand how the Pilgrims actually solved their
The announcement On 31 October 2013, the world’s leading central banks made an important announcement: They said that they would make their “liquidity swap agreements”, which so far had been temporary in nature, permanent. The official language reads as follows:
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From today’s Open Europe news summary: Merkel’s CDU/CSU and SPD seal Grand Coalition agreement Following two months of negotiations, the CDU/CSU and SPD signed off on a coalition agreement early this morning. The Europe chapter of the agreement has not
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Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has the common sense (decency?) to not take sides in the territorial dispute going on between Japan and China in the East China Sea. This doesn´t mean that he has the common sense to not commit some egregious
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The Saudi Arabian government has decided to crackdown on foreign workers. Writing for the Globe and Mail, Martin Dokoupil and Marwa Rashad argue that this will lead to a “stronger, more diverse economy.” In particular they focus on the plethora of businesses
Recently, Brian LaSorsa wrote an article for the Mises Daily titled, “Lawyers, Film, and Money: Copyrighting the First Movies.” It opens up with the statement, “Copyright originated hundreds of years ago as a legal and economic tool meant to protect
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Re: Today’s Open Europe news summary: On Monday 2 December, Open Europe will host an event entitled, “Greece after the ‘double crisis’ – Can the feedback loop between sovereigns and banks be broken and can the economy return to sustainable
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This past weekend I caught The Hunger Games: Catching Fire at my local theater. The movie is based on the second part of a dystopian trilogy written by Suzanne Collins. In Collins’s fictional world known as Panem, a despotic government
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Reprinted from OANOW.com Whenever I’m in Canada I hear the old joke, “How do you get 25 Canadians out of a pool?” The simple punchline most Canadians know and agree with, “You ask them politely.” The inference is Americans aren’t
America is not very popular on the world stage these days. After eight years of George W. Bush’s unilateral approach to foreign policy and constitutionally questionable counterterrorism methods, many thought it couldn’t get any worse. Barack Obama campaigned on a
Now that the U.S. government shutdown is behind us it is instructive to review what we went without for those weeks. Recently writing for the Financial Times, Robin Harding reported that experts feared that the U.S. government would be “flying blind”
Re: Draghi says ECB needs “safety net” against deflation, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is worth reading not because he understands economics but because he does a good job of parroting the misinformed opinions of Europe’s monetary authorities. AEP’s latest
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Until recently, Alan Greenspan’s main argument to exonerate himself of responsibility for the 2007-2009 financial crisis has consisted in the claim that strong Asian demand for US treasury bonds kept interest rates on mortgages unusually low. Though he has not
Mark Twain’s coined phrase “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics” has the privilege of being used far too often and not nearly enough. The saying is invoked by people who see a genius in the mirror but are much
We libertarians tend to be a thoughtful bunch. Most of us were not raised in households espousing the views of individual liberty and personal responsibility, but rather came from more traditional Republican or Democrat families. We could not simply adopt
Reprinted from the Daily Bell Few aspects of America’s past are as thoroughly misunderstood as the history of the labor movements that thrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The modern union that arose and usurped their place
