The war on cash has been going on for decades. The U.S. abolished the $500 bill in late 1969. (The old $500 bill featured a portrait of President William McKinley, by the way. I remember seeing a few when I was a kid). Today’s $100 bill is only worth 10 cents-on-the dollar compared to the
We’ve said frequently that we distrust most (not all) cryptocurrencies. We’ve also made the point that governments don’t go down without a fight and will not stand by while cryptocurrencies undermine their monopoly on money printing and monetary policy. Finally, we’ve also said that blockchain technology, what we call distributed ledger technology or DLT, has
We’ve warned for years about what we call “ice-nine.” This refers to government’s ability to lock down the financial system in the next global crisis. In the 2008 crisis, governments met the demand for liquidity by printing money, guaranteeing banks and money market funds and engaging in trillions of dollars of currency swaps. The problem
The stock market traded down when the trade war headlines first gained prominence in early February. Then stocks just as quickly bounced back on the view that Trump’s bark was worse than his bite, and that the tariffs and sanctions would be full of loopholes and exceptions. As this article shows, that may be wishful thinking. It’s
Pretty much everyone likes Larry Kudlow. He’s smart, telegenic and highly seasoned. He worked in the White House in the early 1980s and was part of the “Reagan Revolution” that cut taxes, cut regulation and stimulated growth. He was also a Wall Street economist, and most recently a television and radio commentator with his own
