The Economist: China's retail investors have lost interest in risk assets

Mutual funds, which invest in stocks and are hard to redeem, saw their smallest inflows in a decade last year.  Money-market funds, which can be sold instantly, grew from 8.1 trn yuan in 2020 to 12.3 trn in July...  Retail investors’ hitherto growing interest in stocks, bonds and investment funds, which the government had hoped would reduce Chinese savers’ fixation with property, has reversed. 

~ “Disrupting dreams: Markets are pummeling China’s well-to-do,” The Economist, March 2, 2024

Colonel Douglas Macgregor on Chuck Schumer's speech on the Gaza invasion

Cyrus Janssen: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, he did come out a couple of weeks ago and say Netanyahu is the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East.  He had a very powerful speech that obviously not supported by the Netanyahu regime.  He was very upset about that, immediately came out blasting him.  Of course you have some people within our Senate and our Congress who had pushed back against Schumer.  Do you think that was really the Democrats trying to somehow save some face here?  Because at one point we just passed a bill for an additional $3.8 billion to Israel and at the same standpoint we are blocking now foreign aid to the UNRWA, which is the only relief agency which actually provides humanitarian assistance to the people in Gaza...

Colonel Douglas Macgregor: Well, first of all I don't think Chuck Schumer was terribly serious about any of it.  That was sort of a smokescreen designed to give, as you say, the Democrats and President Biden some cover.  It wasn't taken seriously in Israel because they know he's not serious.  You heard him speak: "I've supported Israel all my life.  There's no one more supportive of Israel than I am.."  Effectively declaring himself an Israeli.  

~ Colonel Douglas Macgregor, interview with Cyrus Janssen, 12:20 mark, April 3, 2024

Kevin Duffy on Phil Duffy's new book 'A Tale of Four Cities'

To economic historians, the “hockey stick of human prosperity” is that irresistible bright shiny object. Up until 1800, the human population and living standards grew at a snail’s pace, but then a strange thing happened: both took off.

[...] 

In A Tale of Four Cities, Phil Duffy asks an intriguing question: “What if the real inflection point took place 100 years or so earlier?”  Have economic archeologists been unearthing evidence in all the wrong places?  Have they drawn false conclusions?

Challenging simple narratives often leads to valuable, contrarian insights.  By shifting the timeline of the starting gun on human progress back a century, Duffy unlocks a treasure trove.  First, he asserts that the actual dawning was the Agricultural Revolution, which laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution.  Second, he discovers Richard Cantillon, the first economist to recognize the critical role of the entrepreneur in creating wealth.  Cantillon’s Essay on the Nature of Trade in General was written in 1730, long before Adam Smith’s seminal work, The Wealth of Nations.  Third, he makes a compelling case that Smith suppressed Cantillon’s work and removed the role of the entrepreneur, paving the way for misguided theories which treated entrepreneurship as vulgar and exploitative.

This would largely explain why many people in America, far from appreciating their good fortune, are openly hostile towards ultra-rich entrepreneurs like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.  It also explains why those same billionaires give openly to anti-capitalistic charities.  It explains why so many countries have destroyed themselves by ingesting toxic theories on wealth creation, from sub-Saharan Africa, to the former Soviet Union, to Cuba and Venezuela.  It explains why governments in the West have grown to oppressive levels, threatening to strangle their productive hosts. 

If Duffy is correct, much of the world today enjoys a level of wealth unimagined by our ancestors despite worshipping false idols like Adam Smith, paper money and democracy.  Future economic progress is not a guarantee.  In fact, the human experiment appears to be at a crossroads.  Choosing the right path may just require getting the timeline right on that bright shiny object.

~ Kevin Duffy, Forward to A Tale of Four Cities, April 8, 2023

Henry Hazlitt on how FDR suspended gold conversion for Americans in April 1933

The possibility of a discriminatory capital-gains tax on gold ‘profits,’ or even of outright confiscation, cannot be wholly dismissed.  We must remember that in 1933, when private citizens began to exercise their clear legal right to convert their Federal Reserve notes and gold certificates into gold, President Franklin D. Roosevelt suspended the conversion, ordered the citizens to exchange their gold for paper money, and made it illegal for private citizens to hold or own gold.  In other words, the government not only broke its solemn and explicit pledge to convert its notes into gold on demand, but treated the holder (and dupe) who had taken the pledge seriously as the real culprit.  And the Supreme Court later upheld the president’s act and the new law. 

~ Henry Hazlitt

1933 St. Gaudens $20, world's most valuable coin,
sold at auction for $18.9 million in 2021

Ron Unz on the ideological transformation of Jeffrey Sachs

Considering both his international stature and the very broad range of his courageous public positions, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs may easily rank as the most consequential American ideological defector of the last one hundred years, with no comparable name coming to my mind.

~ Ron Unz, "The Transformation of Prof. Jeffrey Sachs; America's Most Consequential Ideological Regime Defector," The Unz Review, April 2, 2024

Alex Kane on the Democrat fantasy about blaming Netanyahu for the Gaza catastrophe

[Senator Chuck] Schumer’s address is the most notable of several recent public statements in which Democrats have positioned Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza—which has killed at least 32,000 Palestinians and engineered a looming famine for over a million—as “Netanyahu’s war.” ... 

But despite Democrats’ repeated suggestion that Netanyahu is the impetus for Israel’s war, political analysts say that in reality the prime minister’s actions are in step with Israel’s political mainstream.  “Schumer is operating in this fantasy that if you get rid of Netanyahu, you might be able to get somebody else who’s more moderate who could then save the relationship between the US and Israel under the pretense of support for progressive values and democracy,” said Omar Baddar, a Palestinian American political analyst.  But this narrative ignores how Israeli politicians almost across the board agree with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, as do the majority of Israelis.  Yair Lapid, the former prime minister and head of the Israeli opposition, supports the ongoing assault, as does war cabinet member Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s main political rival and the man who, according to polling, would become prime minister if Israel held elections today...

Instead of constituting a substantive shift in US support for Israel, experts say, Democrats’ emboldened critique of Netanyahu should be understood as an attempt to respond to growing voter frustration without changing policy, as the Biden administration remains unwilling to use US aid and arms exports to Israel as leverage to demand a change in behavior.  In this context, the choice to focus on Netanyahu “is a political decision to avoid outright criticism of Israel’s war conduct,” said Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace.  For Schumer, in particular, blaming Netanyahu as an individual was a way “to avoid the implication that he is lessening his support for the Israeli state or the Israeli people,” she said. “Instead, Schumer is focusing on a man who is unpopular among Democrats to say, ‘See, we are standing up for our values, so voters should stop being mad at us.’”

~ Alex Kane, "Chuck Schumer and Democrats’ New Line on 'Netanyahu’s War' The majority leader’s recent speech exemplifies his party’s effort to isolate Netanyahu and pacify voters without changing policy," Jewish Currents, March 26, 2024

Schumer speaks at November 14th
"March for Israel" in Washington, DC

Caitline Johnstone on Israel's targeting of hospitals in Gaza

Why would Israel want to destroy Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure?  The answer to that question has been clear for months: to make the land uninhabitable for the Palestinians.  The same reason they’re deliberately starving Gazans, destroying their homes, continually moving them from place to place and bombing every “safe zone” they create. 

This is naturally giving rise to a situation in which the inhabitants of Gaza will either die or flee to some other country — which just so happens to be exactly what Israel wants them to do. 

It’s so obvious what’s happening here.  Painfully obvious.  Poke-you-in-the-eyeballs obvious.  But we’re still subjected to a western political-media class who keeps forcefully telling us that this blatant ethnic cleansing campaign is not what it looks like.  Telling us that all this starvation and destruction and elimination of healthcare services and the way it directly places pressure on the Palestinians to leave their homeland is just a series of coincidences arising from Israel’s “war” of “defense,”  That only by pure happenstance does it look exactly the same as the advancement of an agenda that Israelis have sought to advance for generations. 

Well I personally am through with having my intelligence insulted, and I hope you are too.  The sky is blue, a spade’s a spade, the emperor has no clothes, and Israel is conducting a very obvious ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza.

~ Caitline Johnstone, "Israel's Savage Destruction Of Gaza's Healthcare System Is Exactly What It Looks Like," Caitline's Newsletter, April 1, 2024