The Nominal Anchor Still Holds
Source: Macroeconomic Policy News
by David Beckworth
“The Inflation Trauma Lingers, but the Fed’s Credibility Endures for Now.” (05/07/26)
https://macroeconomicpolicynexus.substack.com/p/the-nominal-anchor-still-holds
Category: Opinion
Where California Went Wrong
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by William L Anderson
“When I was a child, California was really the Promised Land, something cemented in my mind when we came here on vacation in 1961. We saw mountains, Lake Tahoe, the bridges of San Francisco, the spectacular California Pacific coast, and, of course, we went to Disneyland. As a young adult, I ran track for the University of Tennessee and one of the annual highlights of the season was our dual meet with UCLA at Drake Stadium on the university’s campus. (I ran very well against UCLA’s runners, thank you). There really was no place that compared with California, a vast land of so many spectacular things. Unfortunately, there is still a vastness of things here, but many of them are spectacularly negative.” (05/07/26)
Canada Is Quietly Putting War Into Your Portfolio
Source: Common Dreams
by Umer Azad
“Canada is set to host the headquarters of the proposed Defence, Security, and Resilience Bank, or DSRB, a new multinational institution designed to mobilize tens of billions in financing for military and security projects among allied nations. In short, what we are seeing is the quiet normalization of something far more consequential: the permanent financialization of war. The structure being envisioned for DSRB closely resembles other multilateral financial institutions. It would raise capital on global markets, issue bonds, and extend loans to governments and defense companies. That means funding for military supply chains, weapons systems, and defense infrastructure would increasingly flow through financial markets rather than direct public expenditure. In doing so, war itself risks being transformed from a political decision subject to public scrutiny into a financial product embedded in portfolios.” (05/07/26)
Trump’s Corruption Is Going to Sink Him
Source: The Bulwark
by Mona Charen
“Conditions are right for voters to stop turning a blind eye to his greed, grift, and gold leaf.” (05/07/26)
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-corruption-irs-lawsuit-plane-crypto-scam-pardons
Counter-Intuitive Econ
Source: Bet On It
by Alexander Craig
“I want to defend the idea that economics has some counter-intuitive propositions to offer. It does depend on what ‘intuitive’ means, though. I think it’s fair to say that something is intuitive if someone without formal training in the area can think it through on their own. If it takes an economist re-framing the issue to show the answer makes sense, it’s not necessarily intuitive. In other words, economics can be made intuitive, but it takes effort and skill.” (05/07/26)
Trump Leaves Ukraine’s Future to Europe
Source: Washington Monthly
by Tamar Jacoby
“Can a fractious continent unite to win the war against Russia and secure democracy in Ukraine?” (05/07/26)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/05/07/trump-leaves-ukraines-future-to-europe/
The false choice between creating abundance and constraining autocracy
Source: Niskanen Center
by Alexander Mechanick
“Policy discourse in the United States today has a split personality. Many condemn how procedural rules thwart not only efforts to build — housing, energy, and more — but more generally keep presidents from achieving their policy ambitions and worsen our ‘vetocracy.’ Yet others lament how presidents are left too free to pursue their policy aims lawlessly or abusively. These concerns are often raised by the same commentators. Even though these discourses are largely about the same topic—the administrative procedures that constrain government action and govern judicial challenges to it — the two have proceeded almost entirely in parallel. The result is a bizarre discourse superposition, where the executive branch is simultaneously excessively and insufficiently constrained.” (05/07/26)
Contra Everyone On Taste
Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander
“All discussion of aesthetics must in some sense be personal. So: young Scott was deeply disappointed to learn how restaurant critics worked. In his imagination, a critic’s assistant would deliver dishes to her house, so she wouldn’t know which restaurant it came from. Otherwise, the critic might let her preconceptions influence her judgment, and a restaurant’s reputation would become self-reinforcing. … Imagine how I felt when I actually read restaurant criticism. It was all stuff like ‘Oh, the ambience here is very nice; I had a great conversation with the chef who told me about how his childhood in Sardinia motivated new takes on traditional dishes.’ How can you be sure the chef’s personable manner isn’t influencing your impression of the food?! Haven’t you ever heard of the Pepsi Paradox in psychology? Aaargh!” (05/07/26)
Cruising Toward Enslavement
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Steven Goldsmith
“Much ink has been spilled, much podcast time expended on the machinations of the elite globalist class who war against our autonomy, who strive to enslave us through control of our health and financial assets and to depopulate us. All true. But we commoners cannot control what they try to do, cannot temper their sociopathy. What we can do is look at ourselves in the mirror and recognize how we have been disempowering ourselves, allowing our autonomy to be up for grabs; how we have been surrendering that which differentiates us from other animals — free will.” (05/07/26)
https://brownstone.org/articles/cruising-toward-enslavement/
A push for patient investing over easy money
Source: Christian Science Monitor
by staff
“Back in 2018, during his first term as president, Donald Trump called for a curb on a federal requirement that publicly traded firms report their performance every three months. The idea is to nudge both investors and corporations toward longer-term perspectives and focus less on a fluctuating stock price. This week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) unveiled a plan that will allow such companies to provide reports every six months. In the intervening eight years, ever-faster algorithms have enabled warp-speed stock trading, inflating shareholder impatience and expectations of instantaneous information and returns. In 2021, a Cornell University study confirmed that ‘firms were actually becoming more short-term oriented across the market’ – a trend linked to the growing demand for more data and short-term projections for the investing public and markets.” (05/06/26)