The Opinion Exchange

/ March 10, 2017

The Opinion Exchange. One of our primary goals with this newsletter is to provide our readers with a wide range of viewpoints. As noted previously, the risk with this is that we don’t convey a clear idea of our actual views. Yet, we’ve always felt that’s a chance worth taking, particularly since we try to subsequently clear up any ambiguities.

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Heed the Fed’s Balance Sheet Banter

/ February 10, 2017

It is odd how a single event can cause some notable leopards to change their spots. In this case, the election of Donald Trump has caused reverberations throughout the financial world, and some apparent self-reflection by several of the world’s leading thinkers.

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Was Nixon Right, After All?

/ December 30, 2016

Legend has it that Richard Nixon once said: “We’re all Keynesians now.” In reality—and most ironically—those words were actually uttered years earlier by the ultimate anti-Keynesian economist, Milton Friedman. However, former President Nixon did riff off of this when he declared, after removing the US from the gold standard in 1971, “I’m now a Keynesian in economics.” Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be bad news for the American public as Mr. Nixon’s conversion unleashed a decade of stagnation and inflation. As a result, this wrenching experience produced a new term that the disciples of Keynes had previously believed was impossible: stagflation.

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