Worldwide, some $13
trillion of bonds are currently priced to deliver yields of less than zero.
Lenders don’t receive interest; they pay it. Nothing like this has occurred in
4,000 years of recorded interest-rate history.
Bjorn Lomborg: It’s almost
magical thinking to suppose that a gas consisting of only four-hundreths of one
percent of the atmosphere would have more influence on the earth’s temperature
than the enormous amounts of energy received from the sun.
Key foreign-policy
issues
are conducted out of the White House. The State Department and its scores of
costly embassies have become superfluous and should be closed. The U.S. consulates
help tourists with visas and other matters. Isn’t there a way to separate consulates
from the government?
Including
benefits,
Federal civil servants earn half as much again as workers with equivalent jobs
in the private sector. The four richest counties in the United States are
clustered around Washington, DC. The servants are becoming the masters.
It’s devastating when prices fall
because of widespread bankruptcies, as occurred during the Great Depression. But
it’s favorable when prices fall because rapid economic activity induces a flood
of goods and services. This is probably occurring now in the U.S.
It was okay for local
governments to give the cable companies monopolies, enabling them to recover the
cost of laying cable. But the governments should have granted the monopolies
for only ten years, not forever. The cable companies, free of competition
indefinitely, can now charge outrageous prices indefinitely.
