Peter's Blog

The Bank of Japan’s Policy Board concluded its July 30-31, 2026 meeting with a fresh “Outlook for Economic Activity and Prices” that keeps inflation in focus. While the Bank raised its fiscal 2026 growth estimate slightly to a median 0.6 percent, it still expects consumer prices (all items less fresh food) to climb a median […]

U.S. households grew more pessimistic in July, according to the latest data from the Conference Board, and investors responded by sending gold to yet another record. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index fell 1.4 points to 90.8 (1985=100), down from an upwardly revised 92.2 in June and continuing a decline that has persisted since late […]

American citizens, the Fed, and bond markets all know: Inflation isn’t under control. When the Fed prints, they write inflation on the wall. And even if they do everything “perfectly” to return inflation to the target of 2%, that’s just slowing down the pace of their stealing. Your purchasing power is still robbed from you, […]

The Federal Open Market Committee left its target range for the federal-funds rate unchanged at 3.50 to 3.75 percent on July 29, opting for continuity even as price pressures refuse to cool. The 9-3 vote, only Chairman Kevin Warsh’s second FOMC meeting as chairman, preserves a policy mix that pairs flat rates with what officials […]

The vote to intent ratio is the proportion of total intentional government action that is driven by any voter filling their proportionate share of total government action. If the government can be crassly compared to a corporation, each citizen within that government would be a shareholder with an equal share of equity in the state. […]

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton held fundamentally different beliefs about the relationship between Federal and local government. Jefferson held that the local government was the primary building block of the nation and that the federal government had the responsibility to protect rights and deal with administrative tasks such as defense and trade that would be […]

The dramatic heart of the play, Merchant of Venice, centers around a deal that turns a bad financial decision into a matter much more serious than money. In a situation where the titular merchant, Antonio, seeks to help out a friend in a time of social need, Shylock the moneylender gives him a loan of […]

The role of the market as a creator and processor of information is central to Austrian economics. Prices should reflect the collective evaluation of everyone in the market as they utilize their own constrained resources. While the Austrian theory holds the market to be an important creator of information, it does provides a compelling answer […]

“Buy Pokémon cards, not stocks” might seem like a ridiculous phrase until one examines the price history. The market over the past several years has been extremely volatile. From mid-February to early April of 2025, the S&P 500 pulled back nearly 20% from its all-time high, and even the ‘safe’ index of American blue-chip companies […]

Austrian economics does not reduce people to mechanisms like most other forms of economics do. While the Austrian perspective is still to approach economics as a positive rather than a normative science, it avoids numerous pitfalls by simply not making simplifying assumptions about people internally and the way they make choices. Rather than boxing people […]