John T. Reed’s news blog

WSJ yesterday tried to do a sober article on “How to Dip a Toe Into Cryptocurrency.” . It is a useful starting point for a basic discussion of what investments are. I have spent my life on this since Fall of my senior year in college. . One super important aspect if you talk to real understanders of investment is diversification. This is bedrock. . Basically, the are a bunch of different investments and a bunch of different risks. If you have a diverse investments, chances are some of them will do well or better in a downturn of one...

I am glad to see the WSJ and a few others now giving inflation the space it needs. But they are still tiptoeing around the basic problem. Mind-boggling amounts of deficit spending must be stopped and surpluses must be generated to lower the debt-to-GDP ratio. . This cannot be done because the scale of the excesses have been prohibitive. The current discussions of inflation danger seem to be aimed at giving the experts on such things intellectual cover when the ’flation hits the fan. . I do not worry about this at a policy level. I have opposed the responsible...

Today's Wall Street Journal says many of the most expensive grad schools produce grads with huge student debt and little or no job prospects. I will cover that in the book I am working on about avoiding traditional education. . I have also heard it about law and dental schools. The extreme example in the Journal article was Columbia Film School. Half of them make less than $30,000 a year yet average $181,000 debt. . That raises another issue—majors that sound cool. Architecture, film, theater, media, sports management. The article also lists history, speech pathology, and social work as producing too many grads. Another...

Thanks to the 80-person silent majority who came out of my invisible, mostly silent audience here wishing me a happy birthday. Sign of the times that many have names from Southwest Asia, one the recent sources of immigrants in our nation of immigrants. I did not used to have such friends or birthday card senders. I welcome the Southwest Asians and applaud their rapid success in our nation of immigrants. A few groups who have been here far longer need to take note and follow their example. Several West Point grads told me to fall out, gaze around, and take...

Another angle on the border problems: Americans are having too few children. Our population “pyramid” is not a pyramid, which is unhealthy. It looks like a silo.   https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/06/americas-age-profile-told-through-population-pyramids.html  That is also true of most other developed countries. China, Japan, Russia and Europe are worse. Theirs are top heavy—wider at the top (old people) than at the bottom (young people). One of the things that is happening with the border invasion is we are getting more young people than older. In general, we need that. What the quality of them is I do not know. They are from s***hole countries. And...