Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

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Powell Is the New Arthur Burns, Not the New Paul Volcker

2022-07-03

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2022-07-03

Last year, just as it was becoming increasingly clear that price inflation was mounting, Jerome Powell repeatedly denied there was any reason for concern. He called inflation "transitory." A few months later, he admitted it was not transitory, but denied it was "entrenched." Then, by late 2021, he admitted price inflation was getting out of control but still took no action of any consequence.

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Peter Lewin and Steven Phelan: How Do Entrepreneurs Calculate Economic Value Added? Subjectively.

2022-07-02

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2022-07-02

At the core of the entrepreneurial orientation that is the engine of vibrant, growing, value-creating, customer-first businesses, we find the principles of subjectivism and subjective value. Subjective value embraces not only the value the customer seeks, but also the value that entrepreneurs establish in their companies: capital value.

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Who Really Makes US Foreign Policy? Who Benefits and Who Loses?

2022-07-02

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2022-07-02

In a piece of news that shocked the mainstream media, but which shocked no one familiar with the academic industry writ large, retired US Army general John Allen was forced to resign as president of the Brookings Institution after it was revealed the FBI was investigating him for lobbying on behalf of the Qatari monarchy.

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How Bad Were Recessions before the Fed? Not as Bad as They Are Now

2022-07-01

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2022-07-01

With a recession looming over the average American, the group to blame is pretty obvious, this group being the central bankers at the Federal Reserve, who inflate the supply of currency in the system, that currency being the dollar. This is what inflation is, the expansion of the money supply either through the printing press or adding zeros to a computer screen.

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What Will It Take to End Rampant Home-Price Inflation?

2022-06-30

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2022-06-30

Real wages are falling, inflation is at a 40-year high, and the Atlanta Fed predicts we'll find GDP growth at zero for the second quarter. Meanwhile, both the yield curve and money-supply growth point to recession.  But when it comes to the latest data on home prices, there's still no sign of any deflation or even moderation.

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Economic Winter Has Arrived

2022-06-30

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2022-06-30

The average card-carrying Austrian would say that the Federal Reserve is creating money by the bale, with evidence being Consumer Price Index prints of 8.6 percent per the Bureau of Labor Statistics or over 15 percent per John Williams’s shadowstats.com computation based on the way the government calculated CPI back in 1980.

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Contra Ben Bernanke, the Gold Standard Promotes Economic Stability

2022-06-29

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2022-06-29

Currently the world is on a fiat money standard—a government-issued currency that is not backed by a commodity such as gold. The fiat standard is the primary cause behind the present economic instability, and is tempted to suggest that a gold standard would reduce instability. The majority of experts however, oppose this idea on the ground that the gold standard is in fact a factor of instability.

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How Governments Expropriate Wealth with Inflation and Taxes

2022-06-28

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2022-06-28

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Treasury secretary Janet Yellen admitted that the chain of stimulus plans implemented by the US administration helped create the problem of inflation.

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A Critique of Neoclassical and Austrian Monopoly Theory

2022-06-28

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2022-06-28

One of the most controversial areas in Austrian economics, and one where even long-established Austrian theorists differ sharply, is monopoly theory. Indeed, as we shall see below, the differences are not merely semantic, nor are they confined to detail or some minor theoretical implication.

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Markets Promote Real Equality Much More Than Progressive (and Conservative) Critics Claim

2022-06-27

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2022-06-27

The economy consists of a huge chain of the division of labor that is interlocked to such a limit where there exists hardly any single individual or firm that produces the whole of the product alone. This is famously illustrated in the essay “I, Pencil,” by Leonard Read.

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Episode 756: *Throwback* Jeff Deist And Pete Discuss Their Post-Election Predictions from Nov 2020

2022-06-27

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This is an episode Pete released on Nov 1 2020 in which he and Jeff make predictions for all possible scenarios in a post-2020 election world. What did they get right?

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Wholesale Prices Rise More than 10 Percent, Pointing to Continued Price Hikes

2022-06-26

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2022-06-26

Year-over-year PPI growth came in at over 10 percent for the sixth month in a row. This will put more pressure on the Fed to "do something." 

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The Return of the Anguish of Central Banking: Why the Fed and Inflation Go Hand in Hand

2022-06-26

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2022-06-26

The recent outbreak of price inflation with the jump to an annual rate of 8.6 percent in May 2022 came as a surprise to the US central bank (the Federal Reserve). Having ignored the warnings of the Austrian school economists, the policy makers were paralyzed in the face of a phenomenon they deemed impossible to happen. None of their forecasting models had triggered an inflation alert.

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Back to the Future: Progressives Imagine the Good Old Days of Price Controls

2022-06-25

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2022-06-25

When the Bourbon dynasty was restored to power in France in the early 1800s after Napoleon’s abdication, the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand famously said of that family: "They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing." In modern economic parlance, one can say the same thing about progressives, who once again are demanding price controls to "fight inflation."

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US Household Saving Rate Vanishes, Credit Card Debt Soars

2022-06-25

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2022-06-25

The United States consumption figure seems robust. An 0.9 percent rise in personal spending in April looks good on paper, especially considering the challenges that the economy faces. This apparently strong figure is supporting an average consensus estimate for the second-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) of 3 percent, according to Blue Chip Financial Forecasts.

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The Great Crash of 2022

2022-06-23

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2022-06-23

We are now well past the corona crisis of 2020, and most of the restrictions around the world have been repealed or loosened. However, the long-term consequences of arbitrary and destructive corona policies are still with us—in fact, we are now in the middle of the inevitable economic crisis.

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In Defense of Defaulting on the National Debt

2022-06-22

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2022-06-22

With the acknowledged national debt now a politically and economically unpayable $30 trillion (in reality, its unfunded liabilities are far greater), Americans should start to become acclimated to the realities of the United States’ eventual, inevitable default.

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Juneteenth and Secular Holidays as Tool of the Regime

2022-06-22

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2022-06-22

Last year Congress officially declared Juneteenth a federal holiday. While Very Serious talking heads attempted desperately to convince those that would listen that Juneteenth was a long-celebrated American holiday, the reality is that it was largely unknown around the nation prior to congressional action. The episode is a useful illustration of how the state weaponizes secular holidays to promote a larger cultural agenda.

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How Money Printing Destroyed Argentina and Can Destroy Others

2022-06-21

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2022-06-21

The most dangerous words in monetary policy and economics are “this time is different.” Argentine politicians’ big mistake is to believe that inflation is multicausal and that everything is solved with increasing doses of interventionism.

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Powell’s “Soft Landing” Is Impossible

2022-06-20

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2022-06-20

After more than a decade of chained stimulus packages and extremely low rates, with trillions of dollars of monetary stimulus fueling elevated asset valuations and incentivizing an enormous leveraged bet on risk, the idea of a controlled explosion or a “soft landing” is impossible.

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