When Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy in June of 2015, no one (including yours truly) gave him anything resembling even an outside shot. Trump and his candidacy were a laugh line. The previous assertion is not a political statement as much as it’s fact.

According to the New York Times, 564 million Indian citizens don’t have toilets, indoor or outdoor. You read that right. Roughly half of India’s population goes without what Americans of all economic stripes take for granted, and that is standard (indoors) in any American apartment or house.

The British fought three wars in Afghanistan over an 80-year period. They finally left this “graveyard for empires” in 1919, only to eventually be replaced by the Soviet Union in the late 70s, and the U.S. in the aftermath of 9/11.

The great investor and writer Andy Kessler frequently points out that the failure rate among Silicon Valley start-ups is 90 percent. Every member of the economics profession would be wise to memorize the previous figure, and repeat it daily. If so, economists might come closer to understanding why they’re mystified by what they deem slow economic growth. And mystified they are. So much so that they’ve apparently given up.

Amazon’s purchase of high-end grocery retailer Whole Foods was approved last week. That the federal government had any role at all in the combination of two private companies is on its own an offense to common sense. Government barriers erected to mergers trample on property rights, restrain economic progress for crucial information about the good or bad of tie-ups needlessly reaching markets late, plus readers must consider the unseen: the economic activity not taking place thanks to the forced duplication of effort that is an effect of antitrust.

Modern stock-market commentary is always amusing. Maybe it’s the desire among writers to secure clicks in the age of the internet, but so much of the media chatter about markets focuses on the coming “boom,” “crash,” or the always “eerie” similarities to 1929, 1987, or 2008. That it does is a sign of how worthless most equity commentary is.

Seemingly lost in an endless tug-of-war between supporters of big and bigger government is that the federal government is not stockpiling dollars when it taxes and borrows away the wealth we produce. If only that were so.

Completed in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge took fourteen years to build. This engineering marvel brought a still distant world even closer together.

When Donald Trump was elected last November, the dollar rallied. Although the New Yorker had given mixed signals about currency policy throughout his presidential campaign, the price of an ounce of gold (historically the best proxy for the dollar’s value) closed the month down more than $100.