At the start of 2023, many in the tech sector and the venture capital world were coming to terms with lost money due to the hyper-growth strategies they’d employed over the past few years. It seems some IPO’d too soon, expanded too much, or were in need of a pivot to alternative revenue streams.  As […]Read More

As states periodically consider renewing and increasing economic development incentives, they would do well to consider the problem of the Winner’s Curse. The Winner’s Curse is a common result of competitive auctions, where the bidder who “wins,” say, a used car, is overly optimistic about its condition and value and thus overpays for it. Congratulations, […]Read More

Though he’s best known for his powerful metaphor of “the invisible hand,” philosopher and proto-economist Adam Smith saw a role for government in setting market conditions.  The founding father of economic liberalism believed government force was necessary to structure the conditions for a market economy, to create the conditions where people could trade freely. Confidence […]Read More

Peter C. Earle, AIER Research Faculty and former Wall Street trader, joins AIER Senior Editor James Harrigan and Antony Davies on the Words & Numbers podcast to talk about what happened to Silicon Valley Bank. Earle outlines how the bank failure might have been avoided, what comes next, and whether the rest of the banking […]Read More

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) moved forward with an anticipated 25-basis-point increase in its federal funds rate target on Wednesday. It no longer, however, “anticipates that ongoing increases in the target range will be appropriate in order to attain a stance of monetary policy that is sufficiently restrictive to return inflation to 2 percent […]Read More

February’s inflation data were an unwelcome surprise. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) grew at a continuously compounding annualized rate of 4.4 percent on the month. Core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, grew 5.4 percent. The Fed still has some work to do on the inflation front. Now it’s dealing with banking troubles, […]Read More

In his instructive political fable, The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale, George Leef writes, “Liberalism is the one philosophy that requires no enemies… It minimizes conflict and calls upon people to resolve whatever problems arise through peaceful means.” By liberalism, Leef refers to the 17th-century movement that began to free individuals from entrenched interests, “from […]Read More

The AIER Leading Indicator remained essentially neutral in February 2023, maintaining the level of 58 from the previous month. Our Roughly Coincident Indicator rose from 50 to 92 in February 2023, with the Lagging Indicator falling from 50 to 33. Over the past year, the Leading Indicator has declined from generally neutral levels to a […]Read More