Personal Economics 101

By Kelly Evans, CNBC The yield curve is useless! They exclaim. The recession should have been here by now! No, no. The recession is not late yet. And if it doesn’t show up for another three or even six or nine months, that wouldn’t be all that unusual by historical standards. Looking back over the past seven decades, yield curve inversions have occurred anywhere from seven to twenty-five months before recessions began. That’s according to research from MKM’s Michael Darda. The average is fourteen months, and we are currently in month thirteen since the one-year Treasury began yielding more than the 10-year, which is the preferred metric for many professionals to watch. So if the recession doesn’t begin in the next month or two, then the lag is longer than average. But still not unprecedented! And given the dual supports of massive fiscal spending and the Fed balance sheet swallowing up much of the paper losses in the financial system right now, it’s little wonder we’re seeing a de...

Jack Spencer, The Daily Signal Just last month, President Joe Biden took a major swipe at America’s energy independence when he declared nearly a million acres of uranium-rich land outside of Grand Canyon National Park off limits to energy development . Turns out that was just the setup jab. The knockout punch is on its way. According to reports, Biden wants to cancel drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, which would deny Americans access to around a total of 11 billion barrels of oil (though it could be much more). That is a lot of oil. Canceling drilling when Saudi Arabia continues to cut production makes even less sense. That’s because this decision will continue to chill gas and oil development in the United States, meaning that Americans will not only lose this oil but the oil production that is forgone because of the political environment Biden has created . No company, after all, will risk the massive amounts of capital necessary to develop new ene...

On January 2, 2021, a man aboard a Southwest Airlines flight bound for Kansas City, Missouri, from Orlando, Florida, was detained by law enforcement for allegedly assaulting fellow passengers. According to the report from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) , he became violent “because someone in his row would not change seats to accommodate his travel partner.” The FAA fined him $32,500. The next day, on a Frontier Airlines flight that had just landed in New York City, a passenger allegedly attempted to gain entry to the flight deck while deplaning, assaulting two flight attendants and threatening to kill one of them. The captain called for law enforcement to meet the man upon exiting the plane. He was fined $30,000. Reports of air-rage and disruptive behavior such as these on US airlines hit an all-time high in 2021, according to the FAA. On January 13, 2021, the FAA implemented its “zero tolerance” policy . That year, the FAA received 5,973 reports of unruly passengers from a...