# Earl O'Garro > Earl O'Garro on finance, economics, and politics — plain-spoken commentary on the numbers behind the headlines and the choices that shape them. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. Use `/llms-full.txt` for consolidated page and post context. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages - [About](https://www.earlogarro.com/about.md) - Earl O'Garro writes on finance, economics, and politics — plain-spoken commentary on the numbers behind the headlines and the choices that shape them. Education * BA, Wesleyan University * MBA, Syracuse University Professional * Chief Executive Officer — Free Hill Capital Boards & Civic Service * T… - [Media](https://www.earlogarro.com/media.md) - Video commentary and audio on markets, currency, and geopolitics — collected in one place. - [Press](https://www.earlogarro.com/press.md) - News, announcements, and press coverage of Earl O’Garro and Free Hill Capital. In the News * The National Law Review — “Free Hill Capital Launches Free Hill Advisory, Its Strategic Consulting Division.” * The Columbus Dispatch — “Free Hill Capital Launches Free Hill Advisory, Its Strategic Consulti… ## Posts - [The Why Has Never Mattered](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-why-has-never-mattered.md) - By Earl O'Garro I ordinarily write these pieces from home, early, before the day has made any claim on me. I am writing this one from my office in Connecticut, in the middle of a Thursday morning I had set aside for other work, because I stopped that work in order to sit down and read. I have been… - [The Sentence That Was Not the Sentence](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-sentence-that-was-not-the-sentence.md) - By Earl O'Garro There is a sentence a court was able to make Luigi Mangione say in a Manhattan courtroom on Friday morning, and there is a set of sentences the same court has never been willing to make anyone at United Health Group say, and the whole subject of this piece is the specific and defend… - [An Answer From Michigan](https://www.earlogarro.com/an-answer-from-michigan.md) - By Earl O'Garro I was awake late on Tuesday, at the kitchen table where I have written most of what you have read from me this year, with the returns from a Democratic primary in Michigan on the screen and the small provisional stillness of a man who has been waiting, for the better part of the sum… - [The Currency We Forfeited](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-currency-we-forfeited-1.md) - Three Septembers ago, before mBridge had cleared its first sixty billion dollars and before the President of the United States had signed an order forbidding the federal government from so much as studying a sovereign digital dollar, I wrote that the political convulsions then crossing the African… - [For the Sake of All Our Sons](https://www.earlogarro.com/for-the-sake-of-all-our-sons.md) - I woke somewhere over the Aleutians, in the dark of a wide-body 787 cabin that had been dimmed hours before, in the small blue island of my own reading light, with the sound of the engines steady and the sound of a phone against the tray table more insistent than it should have been. I looked at th… - [The Country I Cannot Outrun](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-country-i-cannot-outrun.md) - I was standing in the customs line at Haneda when the news reached me. That is the truth of it, and there is no more honest way to begin. I had come to Tokyo on business with the United States Department of War, which is what our Department of Defense has been called since the President signed the… - [The Country That Gave and the Country That Took](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-country-that-gave-and-the-country-that-took.md) - The country turns two hundred and fifty years old today. That is not a small number. Most countries do not last two hundred and fifty years, and the ones that do are the ones that were willing to argue with themselves in the open, out loud, at the kitchen table, in the courthouse, and on the annive… - [The Men Who Knew Better](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-men-who-knew-better.md) - There is a particular kind of grief reserved for the moment a man who knew better decides, in full view of the country, to pretend he did not. It is not the grief of the fool, who never understood. It is the grief of watching understanding itself bend, quietly, under the weight of a title and a fla… - [The Arithmetic of Versailles](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-arithmetic-of-versailles.md) - There is a particular American habit, older than any of us and more durable than our memory, of beginning a thing we do not intend to finish and calling the beginning a victory. We did it again this winter. On the twenty-eighth of February, under the name Operation Epic Fury, the United States and… - [The Peace That Some Cannot Afford: An Opinion](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-peace-that-some-cannot-afford-an-opinion.md) - What follows is my opinion, and mine alone. A man can tell a great deal about a country by watching what frightens it, and this week I have been watching who flinches at the rumor of peace. On Sunday the President of the United States told Benjamin Netanyahu that an agreement with Iran might be sig… - [Inflation Is a Choice: Notes on a Chairman's First Test](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-is-a-choice-notes-on-a-chairman-s-first-test.md) - There is a kind of lie a country tells itself when it wants something for nothing, and we have been telling it for the better part of two decades. The lie is that money can be conjured without consequence, that a central bank can hold the price of borrowing below the cost of living and call the dif… - [What I Have Tried to Tell You](https://www.earlogarro.com/what-i-have-tried-to-tell-you.md) - Tonight I am trying to figure out how to talk to my teenage sons. I have one boy who is fourteen and one boy who is seventeen, and tomorrow they will know about the verdicts that came down this June, eight days apart and two states between them, because the news will reach them through their phones… - [The Jurisdiction Thereof](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-jurisdiction-thereof.md) - There is a clause, written into the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 by men who had just watched a war kill six hundred thousand of their countrymen over the question of who counts as a person, and it reads with a plainness that ought to embarrass the lawyers now paid to complicate it: "All persons bor… - [Call It By Its Name](https://www.earlogarro.com/call-it-by-its-name.md) - Israel is a terrorist state. We owe the dead the discipline of saying that out loud, in plain English, by the only standards we have ever agreed apply. There is no other word that fits the documented record of its conduct, and there is not much integrity left in any language that refuses to use the… - [The Dollar Remembers What We Forget](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-dollar-remembers-what-we-forget.md) - There is a number that ought to keep a central banker awake, and the number is 3.8 percent. That is what the Consumer Price Index told us in April — prices rising at nearly twice the rate the Federal Reserve once swore, with the solemnity of a vow, to defend. Energy alone climbed 17.9 percent over… - [Dirty Hands](https://www.earlogarro.com/dirty-hands.md) - There is a man in Hartford whose name appears on both sides of the ledger — as counsel for the accused and, if the sworn allegations of the accused are to be believed, as the instrument of his conviction — and this man, Andrew Crumbie, has been given the authority, by a city that did not check, and… - [Sixty Days](https://www.earlogarro.com/sixty-days.md) - There is a strait at the mouth of the Persian Gulf barely twenty-one miles across at its narrowest point, and through it moves something close to a fifth of the world’s oil supply. For weeks, mines have floated beneath its surface — some placed, some drifting — and the tankers that would ordinarily… - [The Weight of the Chair](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-weight-of-the-chair.md) - There is a particular kind of gravity that settles on a man when he inherits what he did not build but must now answer for. Kevin Warsh, newly sworn in as the seventeenth chair of the Federal Reserve, sat in the East Room of the White House on May 22 and received a charge that no confirmation vote… - [The Fire We Feed](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-fire-we-feed.md) - There is a ceasefire in the Middle East, or so we are told. The United States brokered it — a negotiated halt to the war with Iran that was announced on April 8 with the usual pageantry of American diplomatic achievement. Flags, statements, the careful use of the word "historic." And yet, since tha… - [The Accountants You Can't Fire](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-accountants-you-can-t-fire.md) - There is a certain kind of debt that cannot be named, denied, or negotiated away — and the bond market has no patience for those who try. This week, as Congress pressed forward on what Speaker Mike Johnson calls the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," the 10-year Treasury yield climbed to its highest lev… - [What Was Sold Last Night: A Letter to My Children on the Defeat of Thomas Massie](https://www.earlogarro.com/what-was-sold-last-night-a-letter-to-my-children-on-the-defeat-of-thomas-massie.md) - My children: I have started this letter and stopped, started it and stopped, because there are some things a father does not want to be the one to tell. But the news will reach you in time, from every side, and if you are going to hear it from a hundred sources I would have you hear it first from m… - [The Promise of Easy Wars](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-promise-of-easy-wars.md) - In February of this year, the United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran. They said it was to destroy Iran's nuclear program, to end the regime's sponsorship of proxy forces, to remove a threat from the board once and for all. The language was clean, technical, inevitable. There would b… - [The Lobby That Will Not Register](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-lobby-that-will-not-register.md) - The primary in Kentucky's 4th Congressional District is three days away, and by every public accounting it is now the most expensive House primary in the history of the republic — more than twenty-five million dollars in advertising poured into one Republican contest in one Kentucky district. A gre… - [A Fire Already Burning](https://www.earlogarro.com/a-fire-already-burning.md) - Kevin Warsh walked into the United States Senate on Wednesday and walked out with fifty-four votes and the most thankless job in American economic life. The 54-45 confirmation — the narrowest, the most partisan in modern Fed history — tells you something about the moment, not merely the man. It tel… - [The Names in the Book](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-names-in-the-book.md) - There is a moment in every father's life — a small, ordinary moment, perhaps over toast and homework, perhaps in the slow walk from a car to a schoolyard — when the country he lives in stops being an abstraction and becomes, suddenly and irrevocably, the thing his children will inherit. I have arri… - [The Levity of Empire](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-levity-of-empire.md) - On the first day of May, before an audience at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches, the President of the United States stood at a podium in Florida and announced, with the easy cadence of a man returning from lunch, that his country would be "taking over" Cuba "almost immediately." He invoked the US… - [A Love Tap, A Long War](https://www.earlogarro.com/a-love-tap-a-long-war.md) - 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 bet… - [The Last Honest Number](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-last-honest-number.md) - 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 workin… - [The Wages of Another Man's War](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-wages-of-another-man-s-war.md) - 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 i… - [The Receipt](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-receipt.md) - 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 billi… - [The Coin Remembers](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-coin-remembers.md) - There is a particular American tragedy in watching a man who served the institution he helped weaken now insist that the institution must be preserved. On May 15th, Jerome Powell will step down as chair of the Federal Reserve and, in a gesture without precedent since 1948, remain on the Board as a… - [The Strait and the Schoolhouse](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-strait-and-the-schoolhouse.md) - 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 de… - [The Building on Constitution Avenue](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-building-on-constitution-avenue.md) - 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 Dep… - [The Quiet Theft](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-quiet-theft.md) - 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, t… - [Notes on a Borrowed Dollar](https://www.earlogarro.com/notes-on-a-borrowed-dollar.md) - 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… - [The Knock at the Temple Door](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-knock-at-the-temple-door.md) - 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 pol… - [The Price of Other People's Wars](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-price-of-other-people-s-wars.md) - 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 econom… - [The Price of Liberation](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-price-of-liberation.md) - 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 1425… - [The Ledger That Will Not Lie](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-ledger-that-will-not-lie.md) - 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 anyth… - [The Mercy We Cannot Afford: On Medicaid and the Courage to Reform](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-mercy-we-cannot-afford-on-medicaid-and-the-courage-to-reform.md) - 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 tha… - [Trump Administration's Gaza Settlement Plan: A Matter of Ethnic Cleansing](https://www.earlogarro.com/trump-administration-s-gaza-settlement-plan-a-matter-of-ethnic-cleansing.md) - 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 wi… - [Creating an African Central Bank: Unleashing Economic Potential](https://www.earlogarro.com/creating-an-african-central-bank-unleashing-economic-potential.md) - 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 re… - [Unlocking Prosperity: The Benefits of African Nations Embracing Digital Currencies](https://www.earlogarro.com/unlocking-prosperity-the-benefits-of-african-nations-embracing-digital-currencies.md) - 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 Ameri… - [Understanding Basel III: Strengthening Global Banking Resilience](https://www.earlogarro.com/understanding-basel-iii-strengthening-global-banking-resilience.md) - 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… - [Inverted Yield Curves...So What?](https://www.earlogarro.com/inverted-yield-curves-so-what.md) - 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 conclu… - [The Gun Debate and America’s Obsession with AR-15s](https://www.earlogarro.com/the-gun-debate-and-america-s-obsession-with-ar-15s.md) - 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 ri… - [Inflation: The Externality of Generous Fiscal Policies](https://www.earlogarro.com/inflation-the-externality-of-generous-fiscal-policies.md) - Over the span of Mr. Biden’s presidency, he has been forced to confront the ugly realities that come with generous fiscal initiatives: inflation. While many hope to make the debate around inflation a partisan issue, it seems more appropriate to relegate sentiments surrounding inflation to understan… - [Managing Inflation and Consumer Confidence](https://www.earlogarro.com/managing-inflation-and-consumer-confidence.md) - WSJ Article Title: Fed Chairman Powell Navigates the Inflation Debate[1] On August 23, 2021 the Wall Street Journal published an article titled, Fed Chairman Powell Navigates the Inflation Debate, the writers describe how Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, was stuck in an unusually… - [Earl O'Garro Files Grievance Complaint Against Attorney Andrew Crumbie](https://www.earlogarro.com/earl-o-garro-files-grievance-complaint-against-attorney-andrew-crumbie.md) - **Here is a copy of the press release that was sent in May 2017 along with a copy of the complaint that was filed** HARTFORD -- On May 12, 2017, Earl O'Garro, Jr., ex-President and Chief Executive Officer of Hybrid Insurance Group, who was convicted of wire and mail fraud, after a one week jury tri… - [Corrupticut: The Place Where Justice Goes To Die](https://www.earlogarro.com/corrupticut-the-place-where-justice-goes-to-die.md) - I will not spend too much time re-stating what is contained in the attachment. Read and let's discuss, much of this will become relevant very shortly. Related reading * Haiti In Disarray * Where Is the Red Cross and the Half-Billion Dollars It Collected? * Earl O'Garro Files Grievance Complaint Aga… - [WHERE IS THE RED CROSS AND THE HALF-BILLION DOLLARS IT COLLECTED?](https://www.earlogarro.com/where-is-the-red-cross-and-the-half-billion-dollars-it-collected.md) - August 17, 2021 TrueNewsReport By: Nathaniel Ballantyne New York City – Natural disaster is a good business, and no one knows this better than the Red Cross, a nonprofit organization with over a hundred years of experience. In 2010 a devastating earthquake struck Port-Au-Prince killing over three h… - [Critical Race Theory: The Ugly Truth](https://www.earlogarro.com/critical-race-theory-the-ugly-truth.md) - I told myself a few months back, when I heard the term ‘Critical Race Theory’ (CRT), that I was going to leave the subject alone and focus on other subjects like the militarization of the police, or criminal justice reform. Against my better judgement, I elected to dive a bit deeper and try to unde… - [Haiti In Disarray](https://www.earlogarro.com/haiti-in-disarray.md) - Admittedly, back in May of this year I dragged my feet in writing about Haiti and its disarray. With the benefit of hindsight, I acknowledge that my trepidation was rooted almost exclusively in my belief that things would ultimately get worse so I would wait until then to share my thoughts ## Optional - [RSS Feed](https://www.earlogarro.com/rss/) - [Sitemap](https://www.earlogarro.com/sitemap.xml) - [Full content of pages and posts](https://www.earlogarro.com/llms-full.txt)