Business

On the surface, today's monthly budget statement was disappointing: in March the US Treasury brought in total receipts of $216 billion, below the $228 billion last March, versus outlays of a record $392 billion, resulting in a deficit of $176 billion, more than the $167 billion expected, and $68 billion more than the previous year. For the fiscal year through March 31, the total US budget deficit was $527 billion, compared to $459 billion on year ago.

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

In February, David Stockman pointed out that the Trump administration appears none too interested in addressing many of the economic issues that Trump claimed would be at the center of his administration. Instead, Stockman noted, Trump spent all his time obsessing over his travel ban — which he still can't get beyond the courts — and other non-economic issues. Stockman noted: 

Authored by Lou Kerner via HackerNoon.com,

I first wrote about the increasing domination Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon (aka FAMGA) in January of this year. It was not a particularly widely read piece. But every day since then, I’ve become surer of the simple, but profoundly impactful, realization that:

1. The most valuable companies in the U.S. are increasingly tech companies.

Blink, and you missed Trump's blistering, seamless transformation into a mainstream politician.

In the span of just a few hours, President Trump flipped to new positions on several core policy issues, backing off on no less than five repeated campaign promises.

In a WSJ interview and a subsequent press conference, Trump either shifted or completely reversed positions on a number of foreign and economic policy decisions, including the fate of the US Dollar, how to handle China and the future of the chair of the Federal Reserve.

The following article by David Haggith was published on The Great Recession Blog:

During the first several years of the Fed’s “recovery” program, bankers denied that banks were the primary drivers of the stock market bull. Then, a little over a year ago, the Fed’s Richard Fisher confessed what everyone in the alternative financial media already knew — the nation’s central bank was “front-running the stock market” in order to “create a wealth effect.”