Eliminate The Debt Ceiling Several days ago in WaPo, Catherine Rampell published a highly reasonable column calling for eliminating the century-old US debt ceiling, something no other nation has ever had, a position supported by a wide array of economists including such a conservative GOP stalwart as the recently deceased Martin Feldstein, a former CEA […]
Fox News Is Calling The Persian Gulf “The Arabian Gulf” Yes. For centuries throughout the entire world that crucial body of water has been called “the Persian Gulf,” even though in 1935 the nation of Persia changed its named to “Iran.” I became aware several decades ago when I was in Saudi Arabia that they […]
A Half Century Since Apollo 11 Launched To The Moon On July 16, 1969, a half century ago today, a Saturn 5 rocket launched from Cape Kennedy on its way to the moon, where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would land on the moon on July 20 before returning successfully to earth. Recent books have […]
Does Turkish Lira Decline Mean Turkey Leaves NATO? Probably not, but Turkey is about to receive Russian S-400 missiles against US demands. More signifigantly the US will kill high level US F-35 agreements, and will not fly US planes over Turkey if it uses the Russian systems. This threatens Turkish membership in NATO. The immediate […]
The Condition Of North Korean Conventional Weapons This is based on essentially gossip, or if you prefer, a rumor. I have been dining in Washington again and someone there who is in fact both well known and very well informed, but whom I shall not name, made a comment about the state of conventional weapons […]
The Expansion Of Assets With Negative Nominal Interest Rates Buried in the Weekend section of the Financial Times is a report that the aggregate value of assets that earn negative nominal yields has substantially expanded since the beginning of 2019 and has reached a new high. So on January 1, 2019, the value of these […]
Iran Nuclear Deal: Better Late Than Never? Monday has seen a curious coincidence that I have seen nobody else comment on regarding the status of the JCPOA Iran nuclear deal. On the one hand Iran has apparently now officially violated the agreement in terms of the amount of low level enriched uranium it has, going […]
Rice Prices Rising In North Korea According to nkecon, on April 30 the price of rice in the DPRK was 4070 won per kg, but as of June 25 it had risen 26 percent to 5147 won per kg, the highest in many years. The price of corn has also sharply risen although not quite […]
Whither The Price Of Oil? I do not know, which is a kind of silly way to start a post, but pretty obviously this is an opening to talk about some other matters, especially the US-Iran situation. However, I want to point out some things that have been on my mind. In particular, while oil […]
Will Libra Destroy Cryptocurrenciees Or Vice Versa? Yesterday, Facebook released a White Paper on their planned supposed cryptocurrency, Libra, which has apparently long been under development. This triggered two stories in the New York Times, as well as lots of commentary by lots of people, including several posts by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, who […]