The current international monetary system, based on floating fiat currencies, brings about tremendous distortions which inevitably must be corrected. This much has been known to Austrians for some time. Awareness is now starting to spread to mainstream economists. To understand how we got here requires some historical background. Under the
Doug Noland, an analyst for the Prudent Bear Mutual Fund, writes a weekly column called The Credit Buble Bulletin on the Prudent Bear’s web site. This week, he reprints a presentation he gave at an asset manager’s convention (scroll down a few pages from the top to the heading Contemplating the Evolution From the Way We Were to The Way It Is
A paper posted on the San Francisco Fed’s web site provides some surprising takes on the post-bubble economy. The paper, by economist Kevin Lansing, is almost Austrian in the way that it tells the story. The seeds for the subsequent drop in investment were actually sown during the boom years of the late 1990s. Much of the surge in business
Sol Stern, writing in City Journal (the quarterly publication of the Manhattan Institute) takes on ACORN, a lobbying and legal aid organization that has implemented a very successful lobbying strategy for tenants’ rights, “living wages”, unionization of welfare recipients, and a host of other policy planks. The article is interesting for its
I don’t think that this one needs a lot of introduction. A great illustration of governmental bureaucracy. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/world/2003-06-23-phone-line-troubles_x.htm “I am so happy. But I am a bit sad, also. When I applied, I was a young man of 33 and had dreams about owning my own telephone. Now all those dreams are gone. My
Irrational Exuberance was a pretty good book. Sad. The New Financial Order: Risk in the Twenty-First Century by Robert J. Shiller From Publishers Weekly Shiller is best known for arguing, as he did in Irrational Exuberance, that stock market movements do not reflect underlying economic reality and that the volatility of the market makes the
I have just finished watching the fascinating seven-part fourteen-hour documentary New York , produced by documentary film maker Ric Burns for PBS. (Ric is the brother of Ken Burns, the producer of lengthy documentaries for PBS on jazz, baseball, and the civil war). In spite of themselves they managed to do a pretty good job of telling the story
Not an Austrian, but Jacek Rostowski does make some good points (NYT): There are five ways in which deflation is supposed to plunge the world into a spiral of economic contraction. First, once deflation has started, falling prices will make people put off spending, causing prices to fall further. Second, with prices falling and the value of debt
In a piece on LewRockwell.com , I analyze Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil as an astute comparison of the market economy to central planning. For those who have not seen this movie, I think that it is the most libertarian work of popular culture in years. It is both satirical and terrifying in its analysis of the workings of state power. This movie
Martin Wolf, writing in the paid subscriber section of the Financial Times , has written a somewhat heterodox piece about business cycles, including this passage: Because people make exceptionally large mistakes, orthodox neoclassical economics does not work very well. A more helpful guide is the Swedish-Austrian theory of the business cycle,
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.