Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

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Why the Regime Needs the Dollar to Be the Global Reserve Currency

2023-04-04

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2023-04-04

Last week, Fox News aired a segment discussing the possibility that the US dollar will cease to be the global reserve currency and what that would mean for Americans. The tone of the piece suggested that a “catastrophic” decline of the US dollar was not only possible, but perhaps even imminent. CNN last week also aired its own segment suggesting the US will face “a reckoning like none before” if the “dollar’s dominance” in the global economy falls...

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What Our Energy Future Be? A Few Ideas

2023-04-04

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2023-04-04

Access to energy has long been taken for granted as society became quite used to relatively stable prices and the ample abundance of energy. Meanwhile, the business side of energy was relegated to industry insiders, policymakers, and market traders dealing with the matter as a profession. However, the perceptible rise in prices and the fear of supply shortages have pushed energy considerations to the forefront of societal consciousness. This crunch...

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Is the Fed Trying to Bail Out the World? Sure Looks Like It

2023-04-04

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2023-04-04

Like the arsonist who then heroically fights the fire he set, the Fed is increasing its efforts to bail out banks both at home and abroad. This does not end well. Original Article: "Is the Fed Trying to Bail Out the World? Sure Looks Like It" This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

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SVB’s Failure Is Not an Excuse for More Regulation

2023-04-04

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2023-04-04

Recently, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a bank that was heavily involved in cryptocurrency, collapsed. Naturally, Democrats want to exploit the situation to rush through new regulations. But that will only make the problem worse. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank, a forty-year old, $200 billion bank, has caused many to worry about the country’s economic stability. Among the concerned is Senator Elizabeth Warren, who wants to reinstate some of the...

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Cancel Culture: The Digital Panopticon

2023-04-04

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2023-04-04

The panopticon is a hypothetical surveillance and control system first imagined by philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century. It’s envisioned as a tool to control the behavior of a large number of people with as little effort as possible. Here is one description: “The panopticon is a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. From the tower, a guard can see...

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Peasants, Rise Up! The Croquants of the 17th Century

2023-04-03

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2023-04-03

Seventeenth-century French kings and their minions did not impose an accelerating burden of absolutism without provoking grave, deep, and continuing opposition. Indeed, there were repeated rebellions by groups of peasants and nobles in France from the 1630s to the 1670s. Generally, the focus of discontent and uprising was rising taxes, as well as the losses of rights and privileges. There were also similar rebellions in Spain in mid-century, and in...

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Why Most of the World Isn’t on Board with the NATO-Russia War

2023-04-03

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2023-04-03

Many governments support continuing the Ukraine war, but ordinary people in Europe, America, and the developing world fear the war will bring economic disaster.  Original Article: "Why Most of the World Isn't on Board with the NATO-Russia War" This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

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Canada’s Impotent Justice System Is the Product of Dysfunctional Canadian Democracy

2023-04-03

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2023-04-03

Conservatives have been pressuring “the Liberal government to address what they term a violent crime wave, citing the killings of five police officers in five months and a surge of violence in cities across Canada.” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said that violent crime is up 32 percent, gang killings are up 92 percent, and “Police tell us that often they have to arrest the same people multiple times in the very same day because they are...

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Bipartisanship Is Not a Substitute for Voluntary Exchange

2023-04-03

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2023-04-03

Politicians tout "bipartisanship"—that often just means one's pocket will be picked even more cleanly. Original Article: "Bipartisanship Is Not a Substitute for Voluntary Exchange" This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

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Would Stress Tests Have Prevented the Failure of SVB? Probably Not

2023-04-03

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2023-04-03

“This is all about regulation and the fact that at some point in time there was great advocacy for making sure that the regional banks and the smaller banks didn't have to comply with some of the rules that perhaps would not have allowed them to get into this situation because there would've been stress testing and more oversight and more watching of what was going on.” ~ Rep. Maxine Waters (D), Financial Services Committee, March 15, 2023 As fate...

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Why Fractional Reserve Banking Is behind Bank Failures

2023-04-01

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2023-04-01

Suppose an addict had the ability to magically create, ex nihilo, his own stimulating drug, as fractional reserve banks can do with money and credit. Would you expect moderation? Original Article: "Why Fractional Reserve Banking Is behind Bank Failures" This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

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Climate Activism: The Second Children’s Crusade

2023-04-01

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2023-04-01

The "first" Children's Crusade of 1212 ended in tragedy for those taking part. The "second" crusade is not going to produce any happy endings, either. Original Article: "Climate Activism: The Second Children’s Crusade" This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

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The Price of Gold

2023-04-01

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2023-04-01

Mark is not fooling around today. He looks back at the history of gold and its price, which some believe is too erratic and too unstable (like Bitcoin) to serve as a basis of a monetary system. Mark shows that it is not gold that destabilizes events in the real world, but rather real world events related to political decision-making that has made the price of gold unstable. The price of gold is a "minor" indicator of what governments are...

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Can Civilization Survive without Sound Money?

2023-04-01

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2023-04-01

As long as states are around, money will never be sound. But first, some clarity. Sound money, per Ludwig von Mises, has two aspects: It serves as a commonly accepted medium of exchange, while also making it difficult for governments to meddle with it. We can see immediately that sound money is nowhere to be found in today’s world. All the current rhetoric about banks and their systemic risks are about money that’s subject to political expediency,...

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With the Trump Indictment, America Is a Step Closer to Being a Banana Republic

2023-04-01

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2023-04-01

When Rudy Giuliani was pursuing his infamous Wall Street prosecutions in the 1980s, his aides admitted that they were indicting people on “novel legal theories” that had not been used before. A Giuliani lieutenant bragged to a group of law students that prosecutors in his office ...were guilty of criminalizing technical offenses. . .. Many of the prosecution theories we used were novel. Many of the statutes that we charged under . . . hadn’t been...

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De-Dollarization and the Fall of American Hegemony

2023-03-31

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2023-03-31

On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop discuss the global moves being made against the US dollar. The regime's decade long weaponization of money and banking has both international rivals and historical allies looking for alternatives. Ryan and Tho discuss what that means for Americans, and what may come next. [embedded content] Recommended Reading "World needs to end risky reliance on U.S. dollar: BoE's...

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Central Banks Are Creating the Return of Mugabenomics

2023-03-31

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2023-03-31

Because his actions were so outrageous, perhaps it is impossible to satirize the former president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, but perhaps I can describe him. As a shout-out to all my neighbors in the Asia Pacific, let us not forget the Sun Tzu tradition to “know the enemy.” For an analysis of the Zimbabwe hyperinflation, see Jayson Coomer and Thomas Gstraunthaler’s article in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. Below, I draw similarities...

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How Politicians Use Regulations to Deflect Blame

2023-03-31

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2023-03-31

Thanks to their adoring media, politicians create crises and then blame businesses for them. And the political "solutions" are worse than the original problems. Original Article: "How Politicians Use Regulations to Deflect Blame" This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

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Wisdom from a Yenta

2023-03-31

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2023-03-31

Left Is Not Wokeby Susan NeimanPolity Press, 2023; 155 pp. There is much to dislike in this book. Susan Neiman, a former philosophy professor who now heads the “Einstein Discussion Group” in Potsdam, is a socialist who has good things to say about Communist East Germany and parrots every anticapitalist cliché in the book. I have blasted some of her work in earlier reviews. In Left Is Not Woke, though, she makes some good points, and I’m going to...

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With the Feds, It’s the Fox Guarding the Henhouse

2023-03-31

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2023-03-31

Bob is joined by guest Peter St. Onge to discuss how SVB's CEO, as well as Bernie Madoff, had key positions advising the Fed and SEC. Then they discuss how we should think about central banks losing money. How the SEC was Charmed by Madoff: Mises.org/HAP389a Bob's Understanding Money Mechanics: Mises.org/HAP389b [embedded content]

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