Peter's Blog

The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points on September 16th, lifting the federal funds target to a range of 3.75-4% and ending nine months of holding rates steady. Speaking on October 8th at the Istanbul Economic Forum, Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller laid out the reasoning behind the move. His […]

Oil exports in the Middle East have reached 98% of their pre-war levels. For a war that has so fundamentally challenged the traditional oil supply chain, this is an incredible achievement. With oil coming out of the Middle East at the same rate that it did before the war, it is only a matter of […]

Federal Reserve Vice Chair Philip Jefferson delivered remarks titled “The U.S. Economy and Monetary Policy” on October 1st at the Darden School of Business in Charlottesville, Virginia, offering the latest in a string of recent admissions from Fed officials that inflation has run hot for years without a clear resolution in sight. Jefferson acknowledged that […]

Although Aristotle lived over 2000 years ago, he had ideas about money that are extremely relevant to today. He believed that rather than having some intrinsic worth, money was a human convention that enabled coordination between people. He also believed that money was best used to satisfy needs rather than wants, which he made it […]

Throughout history, most cities emerged. They were not centrally planned with a specific end state in mind, but rather flexibly adjusted to the needs of the time. Things like main streets and civic centers were often government supported, but they were merely a layer on top of a structure that had worked for hundreds or […]

Wilhelm Röpke warned us 80 years ago about a threat that would only grow after his death. He saw that Nietzsche and other philosophers of the 19th century almost worshiped size. They believed that scale was a good in itself and they pedestalized it. Whether glorifying powerful states or leaning into the depersonalized aesthetic, the […]

To help simplify this analysis, imagine that there are only two components of a good life: agency and material goods. Agency is the ability to make choices and have those choices be capable of enabling real change at least in a person’s immediate circumstances. While an individual doesn’t need agency in every part of life, […]

Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook delivered a speech titled “An Update on AI and the Economy” on September 28th at the Oakland Tech Week Opening Keynote, cohosted by the Kapor Center in Oakland, California. Cook discusses why she voted with the rest of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to raise interest rates by 25 […]

Entrepreneurship is at its core nothing more than the pursuit of beauty. Although an entrepreneur shares many activities with an employee, the nature of the activity is oriented towards beauty rather than anything else. This is not merely a philosophical preference, but rather the nature of entrepreneurship itself. Beauty is, while not necessarily definable, recognizable […]

Distributism is a recently resurgent form of social and political thought that attempts to create a free society ordered in a specific way through state intervention. This sounds like a paradox, because it is one. Distributists do not like to believe that they are proponents of larger forms of government, however their policies almost inevitably […]