Upping the ante following the initial weaponization of the dollar in 2022, the United States and a number of allied nations have agreed in principle to begin distributing profits on seized Russian assets to Ukraine. Interest payments on securities in which hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Russian foreign exchange reserves were invested, including US, European, and other sovereign bonds, would thus be transferred into a trust account accessible to the Ukrainian government. The US assertion of this undertaking was codified as the Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity (REPO) for Ukrainians Act, signed into law by President Biden on April 24, 2024.

On Halloween 2023, hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller identified what he called the “worst fiscal blunder” in the history of the U.S. Treasury. That blunder occurred in the early months of the Biden administration and accelerated the U.S. government’s unsustainable fiscal path.

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Friedrich August von Hayek

California’s legislature has generally prided itself on pushing the forefront of consumer privacy. As I discussed in a previous post, a few of California’s legislators are even venturing into the realm of neurorights. The latest in its legislative efforts, AB-2529, seeks to protect minors by prohibiting social media platforms and video games from collecting their personal information. However, several imprecisions and redundancies call into question the necessity and effectiveness of this bill.

New data recently released by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows a decrease in wind power production in 2023. Despite record highs in installed wind capacity and continually rising subsidies production is falling.

Over the past three years, the amount of interest the U.S. government has to pay on the national debt has become the fastest-growing category of government spending. It was already the second-largest government expenditure in 2024 and will soon become the largest.

We recently received a copy of this top-secret letter about how to run the perfect war, and we thought we should bring it to your attention!

The voices of freedom in the Republic of Georgia (the former Soviet republic, not the home of the Bulldogs) will be substantially less audible thanks to a new law passed by Parliament. Organizations receiving more than 20% of their funding from foreign sources must be designated as “agents of foreign influence.”

Last week, I explained why the Federal Reserve (Fed) is unlikely to meet its 2% inflation target in 2024, and I haven’t changed my mind. I referred to an article that said, “Fed Chair Jerome Powell made it clear Tuesday he thinks the Fed will need more than a quarter’s worth of data to really make a judgment on whether inflation is steadily falling towards 2%.”

The Berkeley economist Brad DeLong hates Friedrich Hayek—that much is clear from his oversized 536-page tome, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, 25 years in the making. And that’s also about the level of scholarship we can expect. The key ingredients in this politically slanted misinterpretation of the “long” century, 1870 to 2010, are taunts, insults, and extreme value judgments. In the first five pages, no less, Hayek is both demoted to a “mere” moral philosopher and explicitly called an “extraordinary idiot”—only to be resurrected as “a genius” towards the end of DeLong’s excruciating narrative. It’s anybody’s guess why.