Payrolls posted another strong gain in June as the labor market recovery continues. However, there’s a long way to go and other fallout from the lockdowns, including shortages and rising price pressures are tempering the favorable outlook.

We required children and young adults not just to put their lives on hold, but to mortgage their futures, when a system of focused protection like that advocated in the Great Barrington Declaration would likely have achieved better outcomes at much lower cost to the young. We are going to have to grapple with finding a way to make it up to them – and fast.

Adjusting for oil and auto prices puts the rate of inflation below the Fed’s 2 percent average target rate. Still, high rates of NGDP growth and mounting bank reserves should cause Fed officials to be leery of high inflation going forward.

Although I hesitate to bring this to President Biden’s attention, individuals and nonprofits own cannon today. In 2019, for example, Brown’s Company of Artillery fired for five hours in Lebanon … the one in Connecticut. And the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, a private artillery company organized in Massachusetts in 1638, still exists!

Pouring salt into this economic wound, a minimum wage – by pricing these workers out of jobs – prevents them from getting the skills and experience that would enable them tomorrow to bargain for better jobs.

Accreditation is the "key to the kingdom" of federal and state subsidies and widespread recognition of some minimal level of curricular competence. Most students will not attend a university that is not accredited because they cannot obtain financial aid and most employers will not recognize any coursework or degree as a bona fide credential unless the university is accredited.

Considerable resources are expended in the regulatory process to obtain (and defend) patents which may be unnecessary incentives to innovation. In the process, we may end up deterring innovation. With our presently heightened sense of the importance of research and development in setting our living standards, this possibility must be seriously taken into consideration.

Morningstar is right to push back. If only other corporations would do likewise and not cave in to regulatory rules rooted in agency staffer self-interest rather than reason. Free markets can stand some regulation but not virtual takeover by bureaucratic fiat.

These may not be very likely, but a man can dream, can’t he–especially when he’s stuck in stop-and-go traffic? If, by some miracle, some of these actually happen, we can move on to other improvements when Fall rolls around.

In the Fed’s current floor system, the rate of IOR is the key tool of monetary policy. If the Fed raised the rate of IOR, then it raised interest rates.