MARKETS

Understanding Bank Failures and the Objective Role of the Lender of Last Resort

Since government regulatory practice has gone beyond making loans to illiquid-but-solvent banks, to paying back all the deposits of insolvent banks, the result is that there is no reason for depositors to care about whether their bank is taking excessive risks.

Wage and Price Controls Are Not the Answer to Inflation

Reinforcing what economic theory tells us, evidence of the harm of price controls abounds in history, from the infamous 303 A.D. Edict of Emperor Diocletian in Ancient Rome to America’s 1970s gasoline price controls and, perhaps most infamously, New York City’s disastrous eight-decade-long experiment with rent control.

State Investing, Not ESG, Is the Political Problem

The problem isn’t so much that a company takes ideological considerations into account in its business practices so much as that governments — such as state-run pension funds — are imposing ideological agendas on businesses via this financial control.

Wage Rates Under Capitalism

In a free market, within the limit of his abilities, each person chooses that job which he believes offers him the best combination of money and nonmonetary considerations. In so doing, he simultaneously acts for his own maximum well-being and for that of the consumers who buy the ultimate products his labor helps to produce.

Privatize Disaster Relief

The better approach to disasters relies on private initiative, markets, and insurance instead of ineffective government bureaucracies and bloated budgets. Every aspect of disaster relief can be privatized, or rather re-privatized, and should be, if policymakers want to save lives and money.

Commodity Speculation in a Free-Market

Speculative activity, of course, is not limited to anticipating just future scarcities. Rather, it seeks in general to balance consumption and production over time by accumulating stocks of commodities and regulating their rate of consumption.