Utopia, you are standing in it!

If having no power at all was the object of our ‘inevitable transition’ to an all wind and solar ‘powered’ future, then we’re well on our way.

The bitter northern hemisphere winter just gone, has shown wind and solar for what they are: pointless and expensive vanity projects, that only a lunatic would promote and the delusional would accept.

The frigid weather that struck the USA on 16-17 February left its Texan heartland powerless, as solar and wind power output plummeted.  Clearly rattled by the event, the wind and solar cult have tried to pin the blame on everything, except the obvious.

The same goes for events across Germany during January, when dead-calm, freezing weather left Germans desperate for coal-fired power – forcing them to have a good, hard think about their obsession with ‘green’ energy.

STT’s reports on Germany’s renewable energy calamity, sent our site into meltdown for…

The role of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff (aka Smoot-Hawley Tariff) in causing the Great Depression has been an ongoing subject of controversy for close to a century. Ron Batchelder and I wrote a paper (“Debt, Deflation and the Great Depression”) published in this volume (Money and Banking: The American Experience) that offered an explanation of the mechanism by which the tariff contributed to the Great Depression. That paper was written before and inspired another paper “Pre-Keynesian Theories of the Great Depression: What Ever Happened to Hawtrey and Cassell“) I am now revising the paper for republication, and here is the new version of the relevant section discussing the Hawley-Smoot Tariff.

Monetary disorder was not the only legacy of World War I. The war also left a huge burden of financial obligations in its wake. The European allies had borrowed vast sums from the United States to finance their…

Government estimates usually mean ‘not less than’, but this is worse than that. It’s supposed not to be possible to tie the hands of future governments on policy matters, but that’s what the Climate Change Act does, based on the notion that CO2 is ‘harmful’ – except for plant growth and in fizzy drinks.
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Brits were misled about the cost of the Government’s net zero carbon emissions target by 2050 after Whitehall officials played down the estimated £70 billion annual hit, says The Sun (via The GWPF).

In bombshell emails released after a two-year FOI battle, Treasury civil servants admitted to then-Chancellor Philip Hammond that the cost of going green would likely be £20 billion a year more than the £50 billion figure they were told to champion publicly.

Back in Cambridge, I naturally had to read the works from my renown lecturer, Dr. Ha-Joon Chang. One of them was his book Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations & the threat to Global Prosperity(Random House Paperback version). For those who don’t know, Chang in this book launches into a critic ofthe tenetsof the “Washington Consensus”. He further explores the economic history of today’s industrialised nations (some which he covered more extensively in his previous book, Kicking Away the Ladder) to argue that these nations did not develop based on pure market-based policies and ideas, but rather through active state-led actions. Written in a story tale style for laymen (non-economic readers), the book gained much praise from the development and non-development community.

In comes, William (Bill) Easterly, Professor and well-known author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to aid the rest have done…

A Financial Times leader delivers advice that Finance Minister Grant Robertson should (but probably won’t) consider.

Essentially, the advice is to resist the temptation to  involve the central bank in the challenge of slowing the rise in house prices.

Changing regulation and reforming planning law is a smarter way to go.

The FT observes that – to many – it may seem obvious that the central bank quantitative easing programmes launched after the 2008 financial crisis have led to inflation, as money printing inevitably does.

But the inflation has has shown up in booming stock markets, high prices for art and collectibles, and surging cryptocurrencies.  Rather than higher consumer prices, cheap money has led to asset price inflation.

In this reading, the FT says, central banks should reconsider their stimulus policies because they are only delaying and deepening the eventual bust.

Furthermore, according to the critics, stimulus is increasing…