Tag Archives: Featured Stories

“A global house-price slump is coming,” The Economist, edited. I find this article to be interesting although I do not agree with much of it. Prices are an issue; but so are interest rates. Much of the costs of housing can also be from house manufacturing waste. I was watching my new home being built. The scrap is horrendous. The do-overs because of a lack of critical path are numerous. Quality is inspected into homes and not built into a home. I...

I bought a bottle of Belgian beer here in Rome. The guy behind the counter guessed I was from the USA (might have been my Joementum t-shirt) and said something which I now understand was “want a glass”. I said huh and he said “hai bisogna di un bichiere” so I said no. On my one block way home I saw 4 girls very cheerful about 6 to 8 years old. another with dad was arriving. They said that the had done “dolcetto/scherzeto” that is trick or treat....

Because Hayek would, right? I have previously discussed Donald Boudreaux’s penchant for encouraging vaccine hesitancy (see here, here, here).  This is disgraceful, it kills people. But he’s at it again.  This time he uncritically quotes a Wall Street Journal op-ed by the crank Surgeon General of Florida, Joseph A. Ladapo, arguing that young men should not be vaccinated against COVID.  (Boudreaux’s headline states that Ladapo is opposed to...

Seems that gas, fuel, gasoline is being used as a marker to understand just how horrible we have it as a result of the current inflation. It’s just sooooooooooo terrible. I’ll just say this. As a marker of inflation and our personal economic experience all it shows is how terrible we are at remembering. Unfortunately for us, such a bad memory leads us to terrible voting decisions. Though, it does allow for easy emotional manipulation of the citizenry...

The usual mix of articles on the internet. The important ones are healthcare and legal issues. The usual legal issues going on with trump who is flinging as much mud against the wall to confuse the issue of his attack on the US. Eventually, this will come to an end. Hopefully, there is an end where trump is prosecuted to the fullest extent he can be . . , jail. Jail, even if it is for one year. The other big issue I am seeing is commercial...

I’m ambivalent about this Ezra Klein piece: Trump’s efforts to stay in the news, however, are matched by Biden’s efforts to stay out of it. Biden gives startlingly few interviews and news conferences. He doesn’t go for attention-grabbing stunts or high-engagement tweets. I am not always certain if this is strategy or necessity: It’s not obvious to me that the Biden team trusts him to turn one-on-one conversations and news conferences to his...

Brett Crosby currently serves as Region IV Director for the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association, representing Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. He taps into the current trends in the beef market from a producer side, and I couldn’t have said it any better than he has in his opinion piece in Northern Ag Network. Here’s Brett: A blog post published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on July 12, 2022, claimed that Congress is “rushing” to consider “aggressive...

“September consumer inflation: primarily a function of the fictitious “owners’ equivalent rent” plus new cars”  – by New Deal democrat Since last November I’ve been hammering the fact that the official CPI measure of housing inflation, “owners’ equivalent rent,” seriously lagged, as in by a year or more, actual house prices as measured by the most popular housing indexes. At the time I wrote that OER was only up 3.1% YoY and core inflation...

The point of this post is that I see an odd consensus about the conclusion based on opposite assumptions. The conclusion is the standard conclusion that US inflation is currently definitely too high and that it is necessary to reduce it even at the risk of a recession. First the US public considers current US inflation to be a very bad problem. It is easy to see why. Normal people use “inflation” to mean price inflation and assume given...

Six billion. I have written and rewritten the first line of this over and over and over again. Six billion. That is the amount of current US dollars American farmers have to come up with this year as fertilizer prices hit highs not seen since 2008, on top of higher prices last year. The difference is that in 2008 we had a financial meltdown, a run on energy markets, and global calamity. This year, we have supply crunches due to war, restrictions,...