For years, gold bugs were relegated to the fringes of financial markets. Often viewed by mainstream investors as tinfoil-hat conspiracists with basements full of beans and bottled water, their warnings sounded apocalyptic: a coming collapse in financial assets, widespread devaluation of paper money and global disasters that erode civil liberties. […]
If a government wishes to alleviate, rather than aggravate, a depression, its only valid course is laissez-faire — to leave the economy alone. Only if there is no interference, direct or threatened, with prices, wage rates and business liquidation, will the necessary adjustment proceed with smooth dispatch. — Murray Rothbard, America’s Great Depression The […]
It has been affirmed that Canada should become less dependent on foreign trade and the importation into this country of much of what is vital and that it becomes scarcer in times of crisis such as the current public health emergency. It is clear that previously Canada could have become […]
Undoubtedly, a speech of almost 86 years may seem a strange thing to mention, but there are not many precedents to which the world can draw when it comes to the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic. The recent Great Recession could be a logical benchmark for the current crisis, […]
It could certainly be said that it has always been true that a country is safer when its operation depends less on external sources. To the extent possible, providing everything necessary for this operation is a debatable proposition. Still, one could say that certain ideas have been displaced in Canada, […]
A healthy currency must reflect our relationship with nature. Two trillion dollars is the estimated cost of the fiscal stimulus bill that was passed this week by the US senate. Over the past two weeks, governments and central banks worldwide have taken the decision to combat the effects of the coronavirus […]
Other than coronavirus, it is Russian President Vladimir Putin who has wreaked the most damage on Canada’s economy lately. At an OPEC meeting in Vienna earlier this month, Russia refused a request by Saudi Arabia to cut back on oil volumes, in order to prop up prices. Snubbed, the Saudis […]
For years, regulators have tried to make the financial system safer by blocking banks from taking on the extreme leverage that almost toppled the industry in 2008. Turns out, the risks just moved. In a matter of days, a slew of trades unraveled to expose various forms of soured levered […]
It has already become a cliché to assert that the United States (and other advanced western countries) must not catapult their economies backward into debt-ridden depression in emancipating themselves from the specter of the coronavirus, and it has become a political pinata sadistically assaulted by President Donald Trump’s enemies that […]
Austrians and Libertarians are well-established critics of central banking in general, and emergency monetary stimulus in particular. There is near universal agreement that Alan Greenspan should not have cut rates following the Dot-Com Bubble, and that Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen should not have quadrupled the monetary base following the […]