Fed's Schmid calls for tighter monetary policy to tamp down on 'too high' inflation

Central Banking: The Scourge Of Civilization

Central Banking: The Scourge Of Civilization Authored by George Ford Smith via Mises Institute, Apple builds and sells iPhones. I happen to own one of the older models, for the same reason I own a last-legs older model car. What if Apple could skip the build part and sell only the phone? The money saved would be an enormous boost to its bottom line. And if Apple passed the savings onto customers I could conceivably afford to upgrade. Where would the phones come from? From a bookkeeping entry, of course. Unfortunately, Apple's customers are very demanding and want the real things, so the build operations will have to stay. Perhaps their executives looked upon another business and envied their ability to sell loans without drawing down their savings. Customer with good credit wants a loan? Create the amount with a few taps on a keyboard and send him on his way. The customer will spend his newly-acquired money, thus keeping people employed. Since he has good credit, he will be able to make monthly payments, and the lender, the bank, will normally apply his payments to extinguish the loan, with the interest being the bank's profit. Everyone's happy and the economy keeps expanding until it busts. Experts will diagnose the bust. The usual fiends will get blamed. Government will step in to cure the problem its monetary and banking interventions helped create. The economy will slowly recover and continue on the same path as before, meaning banks will continue extending credit from ether rather than savings. How did thi

World's Largest Refiner Says China's Oil Demand "Very Likely Peaked Last Year"

World's Largest Refiner Says China's Oil Demand "Very Likely Peaked Last Year" One of the most understated stories of 2026, and the reason why oil (and gas) aren't trading at persistently nosebleed levels (ignore diesel for the time being), has been China's unexpectedly weak oil demand. And while there has been much speculation surrounding the reason for this chronically weak oil demand, ranging from an accelerated - and offsetting - SPR drain, to a dramatic economic slowdown behind the scenes (or even in front of the scenes based on the latest dismal economic data), today for the first time we got a notable justification for this phenomenon coming from none other than the head of the nation’s - and world's - largest refiner,  who said that China’s oil demand probably peaked last year, earlier than previous estimates. Clean energy development, electrification and low-carbon goals mean that the country’s oil demand has probably already crested, Sinopec Chairman Hou Qijun said Monday at an earnings briefing in Hong Kong, quoted by Bloomberg. The company had previously forecast usage to top out in 2027, while the government is targeting oil and coal consumption to reach their limits during the current five-year plan period, which runs through 2030. “Next year, even if the US-Iran conflict eases up, things might recover, but it won’t hit last year’s level,” Hou said. “So it’s very likely demand peaked last year.” Since China is the world’s largest oil importer, an earlier start to reducing consumpti

DOJ To Deploy 1,000 Election Monitors For Midterms

DOJ To Deploy 1,000 Election Monitors For Midterms The Justice Department is preparing to send a record 1,000 federal monitors to polling places for the 2026 midterms, the largest deployment of its kind in the agency's history. Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who runs the Civil Rights Division, gave the number to Bloomberg last week and the figure alone tells you how central "election integrity" has become to this administration's second-term agenda. This is not unprecedented. The Civil Rights Division has monitored polling places for decades under the Voting Rights Act, which bars discrimination, intimidation, or obstruction of voting based on protected characteristics such as race, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability.

Michigan's Energy Abundance Is On The Ballot

Supreme Court Backs Trump's Mail-In Ballot Overhaul

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The Great Walkback: Sam Altman Admits He Was Wrong On AI's Economic Timeline