Wednesday

Keith Weiner’s notates and dissects the most immediate problems stemming from the lock-downs.

 “…we’re now going to make a call, for the first time, for certain consumer prices to rise. This call is absolutely, positively not based on rising quantity of money. It is based on three things. First, as we said in item number one above, many vendors and service providers in many supply chains will be ruined. This will make manufacture and distribution of consumer products less efficient, slower, and more expensive. Second, the government will be ordering, or in many cases outright owning, the means of production. We see this already with President Trump ordering General Motors to manufacture ventilators, a product with which GM certainly has no experience, expertise, or efficiency in producing. It should go without saying that government-directed production is expensive (and, of low quality). Low quality, it should be noted, itself makes things more expensive for everybody. Third, in the new normal that is to come, there will simply be fewer restaurants and fewer stores of every type who remain in business. Lessened competition will enable the survivors to charge higher prices.”

And here is the full article.  Get a beer or a cup of tea before you read it.

Sunday

“Is part of the reason for a decline in gold liquidity that the financial system itself is under stress?”

Read it all here

Tuesday

If this (so far) anonymous graph is authentic – i.e. correct data points and approximately equal in time frame, then they bear a remarkable similarity.

Update – the graph came from Zero Hedge

Hat tip Thomas Allen

There is a lot of valuable ground covered in the following audio/video interviews…

First, with Jeff Deist – President of the Mises Institute.

 

Then, with Jay Taylor…

 

The enthusiasm with which our parliaments and their departments produce regulations implies a belief that when a sufficient number have been enacted we will have a social and economic perfection.

I am reminded of the saying ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’

Yet they cannot cease their destructive impulses, for were they to do so, then it would be the acknowledgement that they are superfluous to requirements.  To put it more bluntly – a complete waste of time, space, energy and, more importantly, money.

Keith Weiner has produced another excellent piece this week on just this subject…

“We have spilled barrels of electronic ink, making the point that central banks are wreaking havoc. They hurt the poor, the middle class, and the rich. They hurt the wage earners, the business owners, the investors (aka the “rentiers”), and the pensioners. They have variously inflicted rising interest rates, too-high rates, falling rates, and too-low rates. They have imposed perverse incentives to destroy capital and consume wealth.”

Read it all.