The reality that tariffs always inflict great economic damage and leave society worse off is not a debatable outcome, rather it’s a provable fact, like the law of gravity. So, why do policymakers keep going back to it over and over again? Here are 25 reasons.

The Federal Reserve is centralizing and cartelizing central-bank policy worldwide. Will Trump move to end these moves toward one global central bank?

While US consumers may have stepped back from a credit-card funded splurge in the last month of 2016, the far more troubling trend in student and auto loans remains, and as the following chart shows, as of Q4, both car and student debt hit all time highs of $1.407 trillion and $1.11 trillion, respectively.

Iran says that, due to the added sanctions, they will no longer utilize the dollar for transactions. Here is what that means for the dollar and you.

The popularity of protectionist trade policy is growing and is being actively promoted by President Trump. The appeal is clear and understandable: protectionism does save and protect some American jobs in protected industries, and those jobs are easily visible, identifiable, and measurable. But the one group of Americans we never hear about from Trump when he discusses international trade are the most important group of Americans – the American consumers who are the group that have the most to gain from international trade and the group that has the most to lose from trade barriers.

To economists, free trade means the absence of government interference with trade: no tariffs, quotas, subsidies, or other interventions, explicit or implicit. To politicians, “free-trade” means a complex set of managed trade policies. So, is all that extra government “coordination” necessary?

The US government, either on purpose or due to honest miscalculation, has been fabricating student loan default data, making it appear far lower than it was. The Education Department released a memo saying that it had overstated student loan repayment rates at most colleges and trade schools and provided updated numbers. A spokeswoman for the Education Department said that the problem resulted from a “technical programming error.” How bad was the data fabrication? When The Wall Street Journal analyzed the new numbers, the data revealed that the Department previously had inflated the repayment rates for 99.8% of all colleges and trade schools in the country. In other words, virtually every single number was made to appear better than it was.

Why aren’t Millennials investing in the stock market? Why aren’t they starting families and buying houses? Why are they living in their parents’ basements well into their thirties? Why don’t they just… spend? Here is the answer.

The rapid rise in interest rates coupled with an astonishing increase in the debt creates an obvious long-term trend with major consequences that anyone would be foolish to ignore.

Not a single U.S. airport was ranked in the top 25 airports in the world, and worse still, our largest and most important airports in cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles scrape the very bottom in terms of customer satisfaction.

As physical currency around the world is increasingly phased out, the era where “cash is king” seems to be coming to an end. Although this transition may feel like a natural progression into the digital age, the real motivation to go cashless is downright sinister.

The headlines tell us that the Dow Jones is up around 1,000 points since Donald Trump won the election on November 8th. The conventional wisdom is that this shows how much confidence people have in Trump’s ability to generate a healthy American economy. The argument is that if people are willing to buy stock in American firms, this indicates their belief that those firms will see improving profits over the next few years. They then draw the conclusion that more profitable firms indicate a healthier American economy. Although this argument is correct about stock prices reflecting an increasing belief in the profitability of US firms, it makes a major error in assuming that profitable firms necessarily mean a better economy.

While giant numbers like $20 trillion sound abstract and meaningless, converting them to debt-per-capita can make things more intuitive. While many are rightly concerned about what Trump policies mean for government debt, it is the Belgians, Singaporeans, Irish, and Japanese that should really be worrying…

With a long history behind it the American Dollar continues to be the world’s reserve currency. But, with all the unrestrained printing going on by Washington in collusion with the Federal Reserve, how much longer can it last?

The national debt and cutting government spending simply are not topics the voters care about anymore.

Thousands of people recently demonstrated in Brussels against free trade deals negotiated by the EU. This happened just days before a meeting of EU trade ministers in Bratislava last month, which was considered the last push to salvage the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the United States. Not only is Europe divided on the deal, […]

What exactly did you get for that money? Did they spend $1.4 trillion on achieving world peace, eradicating poverty, saving the planet, or some other pipe-dream? Did they finally fix America’s crumbling infrastructure that has been in desperate need of repair? Did they send a gigantic tax refund check to every man, woman, and child in the country? Actually the answer is (D), none of the above. They squandered it all.

Critics of liberalism (liberalism in the classical sense) and the market economy have made a long-standing habit of inventing terms we would never use to describe ourselves. The most common of these is “neo-liberal” or “neo-liberalism,” which appears to mean whatever the critics wish it to mean to describe ideas they don’t like. To the extent the terms have clear […]

Do you remember the old Saturday Night Live sketches in which comedian Chris Farley portrayed a motivational speaker that lived in a van down by the river?  Unfortunately, this is becoming a reality for way too many Americans.  Share This Article