I love watching a good movie or TV show. While not overly creative myself, I thoroughly enjoy taking in someone else’s work of art to gain a greater understanding of his or her perspective, and these two mediums are amongst my favorite. My wife would readily tell you that I often think deeply about the […]

Gallup polling this week showed that the credibility of the Federal Reserve is down to 36% (those that have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence)–the lowest level since Gallup begin tracking. To be sure, as Gallop notes, this tends to track overall economic performance. And most people are particularly pessimistic about the economy, […]

One of my favorite external groups is the Acton Institute, which explores the intersection of faith and free markets. The faith part is broadly ecumenical, and intentionally international, so it has an interesting set of fellow travelers. I like (and occasionally publish) in their Journal of Markets and Morality. Each summer they host Acton University, […]

Recently, I finished my coursework in my graduate program. This means I spent the last two years reading a lot of books and articles. In light of world events over the past few years, one stood out as worth recommending to a broader group of people due to its timely message and solid fundamentals. Money […]

On Tuesday, Donald J. Trump, the forty-fifth President of the United States, became the first of America’s former chief executives to be indicted in a criminal court. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office charged Trump with thirty four counts of falsifying business records. The allegations revolve around Trump’s payments to suppress damaging information during the 2016 […]

Well, the Democratic District Attorney of Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, has convinced a majority of the grand jury pool he convened to bring an indictment of Donald Trump. Tomorrow Mr. Trump will be arraigned, with a spectacle that will take us to a new low in politics. You don’t need BATG to do analysis on this; […]

Last night the Russians bombed a dormitory, killing seven people in Ukraine. The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for Mr. Putin as a war criminal; thousands of civilians have been killed and wounded, Ukrainian children have been abducted into Russia, hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides, and there are over eight […]

As we learn more and more about Silicon Valley Bank, the basic problems are not really in doubt, but political posturing makes understanding really difficult. Henry Hazlitt has a nice quote in the 1st paragraph of his Economics in One Lesson that is apropos. Obviously the interest group of the affected bankers and depositors quickly […]

F.A. Hayek’s famous quote is: The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. While Hayek’s quote is most appropriately placed against government central economic planning of socialism, it applies against any government action that tries to manage the economy by going […]

One of my constant refrains in the Trump era was to point to the mixed bag of his policies; much to like, much to dislike. I was most hostile to his cronyist trade policy of favoring one industry against another (e.g., favoring the steel industry at the expense of other US manufacturers that use steel*). […]