The Federal Reserve has set a 2% target for inflation, which, if hit, would result in prices doubling in about 36 years. Is this the “best” inflation rate in some sense?

“First Republic Seized, Sold to JPMorgan,” reads the headline on page A1 of May 2’s Wall Street Journal. First Republic’s collapse—the second largest bank failure in U.S. history, according to the story’s authors, Rachel Louise Ensign and Ben Eisen—quickly lost half of its deposits ($100 billion) in the wake of the unraveling of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March.

Since President Biden announced he would forgive the student loans of millions of Americans last year, the biggest unanswered question about the scheme has been how much it would cost taxpayers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI numbers show that prices were up 4.9% from April 2022 to April 2023. We can be pretty confident that, measured by the CPI, inflation is much lower now than when it peaked a year ago. Inflation is slowing.

The Federal Reserve is tasked with ensuring the stability of the financial system in the United States. Following the failures of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Signature Bank, and Silvergate Bank in March, the Fed introduced a new facility called the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP). The BTFP “offers loans of up to one year in length to banks, savings associations, credit unions, and other eligible depository institutions pledging US Treasuries, agency debt and mortgage-backed securities, and other qualifying assets as collateral. These assets will be valued at par.”

• Mises’ most memorable contribution is the
• argument of his 1922 book, Socialism, which leaves central planning in tatters.
• rarely, however, do many of the other insights of that great book get the attention they merit.
• rarely, for instance, do people recall Mises’ passage on the economics of marriage.
• yet, perhaps we should; economics applies to all of life.

Ze’ev Wurman, a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, passed away on April 29, 2023. Just before he affiliated with Independent in 2021, Ze’ev had co-authored an Independent Institute open letter criticizing the proposed California mathematics curriculum—an open letter signed by hundreds of professors and other prominent people in STEM fields.

Propaganda is checked by open challenge and spirited disputation. But it is hard to discuss one’s own government at war, because you might be treated as an apologist of the enemy, or even an outright enemy yourself. Propaganda is perhaps never worse than at times of war. That is when government is most likely to destroy precious domestic freedoms.

California Senate Bill 494, authored by Fullerton Democrat Josh Newman, stipulates that “The governing board of a school district shall not take action to terminate a superintendent or assistant superintendent of the school district, or both, without cause, at a special or emergency meeting of the governing board.” In similar style, the board shall not terminate a superintendent or assistant superintendent, “within 30 days after the first convening of the governing board after a general election.” Californians might wonder what this is about. 

On May 1, 2023, regulators seized control of First Republic Bank and sold it to JPMorgan Chase. Founded in 1985, the bank had already been struggling to stay afloat following the collapse of two other lenders in March, which had sowed seeds of worry among both depositors and investors. First Republic Bank’s shuttering has been the most recent banking domino to fall since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and Silvergate Capital weeks prior.