Earl O'Garro

There is a particular kind of dishonesty that begins to bloom whenever a republic finds itself at war and would rather not say so. It does not announce itself. It comes dressed in idiom — in the casual phrase, in the smiling shrug, in the assurance that whatever just happened in the dark waters between two nations was hardly anything at all. President Donald Trump, on Thursday, after three United States Navy destroyers — the USS Truxtun, the USS Rafael Peralta, and the USS Ma

There was a time, not so long ago, when Americans believed that a number meant a thing — that a price was a fact about the world and not the polished opinion of a committee, that a dollar earned in the morning was a dollar still in the evening, that the savings of a working life would meet a working man at the other end of it without having been hollowed out by the hand of an economist. That belief — and let us call it what it was, a belief, half-religion and half-republican

There is a particular cruelty in being asked to pay for a war you did not vote for, did not believe in, and were promised would be over by now. The founder reading this on a Monday morning — the woman running a fourteen-truck logistics outfit out of Bridgeport, the man who put his second mortgage into a coffee roaster in Hartford, the immigrant family holding together a four-store dry-cleaning chain on the strength of a revolving line of credit — none of them ordered the stri

There is a number a man ought to be made to look at. Three hundred and fifty-two billion dollars, since the founding of the State of Israel — that is what the Congressional Research Service and the Council on Foreign Relations have, between them, totaled — of which two hundred and sixty-three billion was military aid: bombs, fighter aircraft, the iron domes that protect a country whose own iron grip on Gaza we are then asked, by the same Prime Minister, to also pay for. In th

A free people cannot indefinitely outsource the value of its currency to men in suits, regardless of their party. Whatever side wins this fight on Constitution Avenue, the enduring fight is older and harder.

There is a school in Minab, in the south of Iran, that is no longer there. A missile is reported to have killed more than a hundred and fifty people inside it — most of them, the United Nations Independent Fact-Finding Mission noted in March, schoolgirls between the ages of seven and twelve. The detail is not decorative; it is the floor of the argument. Whatever Benjamin Netanyahu says he is doing in Iran — and he has said, on the record, that he "crushed the Iranian regime's

There is, in this country, a building on Constitution Avenue that has come to mean what we will not say aloud. Its renovation cost a billion dollars more than promised — asbestos and sinkholes, we were told, the price of fixing what no one had thought to repair — and last week, on a Friday, the Department of Justice quietly closed its investigation into the man who signed the contracts. By Sunday, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina had withdrawn his objection to Kevin Wars

There is a theft that no one will prosecute, committed in broad daylight, announced in press releases written in the anesthetized language of men who have been trained never to say what they mean. This week, while the country argued about borders and budgets and who sat where on the Sunday shows, the Federal Reserve quietly announced that it had discontinued the runoff of its balance sheet, that it would begin, once again, reserve management purchases, that it would enhance i

There is something obscene, and I mean obscene in the old ecclesiastical sense — a thing set apart from the sacred — about the spectacle of grown men and women gathering quarterly in a marble room in Washington to decide, by vote, what the price of money will be, as if the cost of borrowing were a matter not of markets and risk and the patient accumulation of savings but of committee sentiment, of tea leaves read by bureaucrats, of twenty-five basis points conjured or withhel

There is a building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., a white marble edifice overlooking the National Mall, and inside it — or so we are told — the guardians of our money sit in quiet deliberation over interest rates and inflation targets and the careful, clinical language of monetary policy. The Federal Reserve has long occupied a peculiar place in American life: too powerful to ignore, too opaque to understand, and too insulated, its critics say, from the democrat

There is a number on the gas pump, and there is a number in the Federal Reserve's minutes, and the distance between these two numbers — the one you see with your own eyes and the one they discuss in rooms you will never enter — is the precise measure of the lie they are telling you about the economy. In March, gasoline prices surged twenty-one percent in a single month. The Consumer Price Index leapt to 3.3 percent year-over-year, nearly a full point higher than the month bef

One year ago this month, we were told that liberation had arrived — not in the form of expanded freedom, not in the loosening of the chains that bind the entrepreneur, the small manufacturer, the woman importing fabrics for her business in Flatbush — but in the form of tariffs. Executive Order 14257, signed with ceremony in the Rose Garden on April 2, 2025, promised that factories would roar back, that prices would fall, that a new era of American wealth was being born. The w

There is a clock in Manhattan, on Sixth Avenue near Forty-Third Street, that does not tell time in any way most of us would find comforting. It counts, instead, the accumulation of a national obligation that has now surpassed thirty-nine trillion dollars — a figure so vast, so untethered from anything resembling human experience, that one is tempted to look away, to treat it as abstraction, the way one treats the distance between stars. But this is not abstraction. This is th

There is a particular kind of dishonesty that passes for compassion in this country, and it has held us captive for generations. It is the dishonesty of promising people that the government will take care of them while building a system so bloated, so inefficient, and so politically untouchable that it slowly devours the very treasury meant to sustain the nation. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act has placed the question of Medicaid reform squarely before us, and the response — p

President Donald Trump revealed in February 2025 a highly contentious plan to transfer Palestinians from Gaza to neighboring countries like Egypt and Jordan. His plan was to transform Gaza into the "Riviera of the Middle East" and did not exclude using American forces to do so. The plan has been widely criticized as a means of ethnic cleansing, a term applied to the forced transfer of a religious or ethnic population from a particular territory, often with the use of violence

Africa, a continent of unparalleled diversity and untapped potential, has long grappled with economic challenges that have hindered its development. One bold solution that has been proposed is the creation of an African Central Bank, a unified monetary authority that could play a pivotal role in reshaping the continent's economic landscape. This essay explores the potential benefits of Africa establishing its own central bank, from fostering economic stability and growth to e

Recent regime changes in Niger and Gabon should open our eyes to the reality that our naïve belief that Africa is a monolith is an incredibly dangerous position. Our generalized western conception of the needs and wants of countries in Africa has crashed violently against the reality that our American conception of “democracy” on its face is incredibly hypocritical and disconnected from the reality. Many countries on the continent of Africa are experiencing a tectonic shift p

In the aftermath of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, policymakers and regulators recognized the need for enhanced stability and resilience in the banking sector. To address this, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) introduced Basel III, an international regulatory framework that aims to fortify the banking system by implementing stringent risk management and capital adequacy standards. In this post, we will delve into the key aspects of Basel III and under

I’ve been unapologetic in my critique of the Biden Administration’s fiscal response to inflation and equally critical of the Feds response by way of monetary policies. My opinion has not changed that the U.S. economy will be in full-fledged recession by the fall of 2023 and I’ve reached this conclusion by focusing on the commercial mortgage market as well as exploring recessionary signals like inverted yield curves. As I began my research for this piece, I was quite frankly s

I would imagine for almost everyone else, their Friday night consists of DM’s asking how they intend to spend their impending holiday weekend; DM’s confirming plans or attempts to create new plans, but my DM’s consist of angry liberals accosting me for my views on gun ownership and 2nd Amendment rights in light of the tragic events in Uvalde, TX. Before I explain in great detail the framing issues that we have around guns in America I will give you an opportunity to stop read