Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

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Why Central Banks Will Choose Recession Over Inflation

2022-12-20

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2022-12-20

While many market participants are concerned about rate increases, they appear to be ignoring the largest risk: the potential for a massive liquidity drain in 2023. Even though December is here, central banks’ balance sheets have hardly, if at all, decreased. Rather than real sales, a weaker currency and the price of the accumulated bonds account for the majority of the fall in the balance sheets of the major central banks.

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Austerity: A Real Solution to Help Heal the U.S. Economy

2022-12-18

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2022-12-18

Austerity works. We know what it is and don’t like it, but it works. It usually means cutting your consumption and spending, paying down your debts, pawning assets, and working more hours to restore your economic situation.

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The Fed’s Powell Admits “I Don’t Know What We’ll Do” in 2023

2022-12-18

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2022-12-18

The Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on Wednesday announced it will raise the target federal funds rate by 50 basis points, bringing the target rate to 4.5 percent. Wednesday's rate hike followed four hikes in a row of 75 basis points, and is the smallest rate hike since March.

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Keynesian Policies Gave Us High Debt, Inflation, and Weak Growth

2022-12-17

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2022-12-17

The evidence from the last thirty years is clear. Keynesian policies leave a massive trail of debt, weaker growth and falling real wages. Furthermore, once we look at each so-called stimulus plan, reality shows that the so-called multiplier effect of government spending is virtually nonexistent and has long-term negative implications for the health of the economy.

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Decentralization, Freedom, and Peace Are the Pillars of a Free Society

2022-12-17

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2022-12-17

[This article is the foreword to Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Decentralization, and Smaller Polities, by Ryan McMaken, available in PDF, at the Mises store, and on Amazon.]  Classical liberal tradition defends the right of secession on many grounds.

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Global Rate Hikes Hit the Wall of Debt Maturity

2022-12-16

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2022-12-16

More than ninety central banks worldwide are increasing interest rates. Bloomberg predicts that by mid-2023, the global policy rate, calculated as the average of major central banks’ reference rates weighted by GDP, will reach 5.5%. Next year, the federal funds rate is projected to reach 5.15 percent.

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Economic Growth Requires Savings, Not Money Pumping

2022-12-16

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2022-12-16

The U.S. personal savings rate eased in September to 3.1 percent from 3.4 percent in August. In September 2021 the savings rate stood at 7.9 percent. By popular thinking, a decline in the savings rate during an economic slowdown is regarded as supporting economic activity.

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Father Time vs. Central Bankers

2022-12-15

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2022-12-15

An excellent new book from Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time, sets out to explain both the theory and history of interest rates across five millennia and countless cultures. The theory is frequently bungled by economists; the history is frequently glossed over by historians. But thankfully Mr. Chancellor is up to the task. He is an excellent and engaging writer, owing presumably to his long career as a financial journalist.

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And So It Begins: Digital Currency Becomes Possible in our Future

2022-12-14

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2022-12-14

In mid-November, while the whole world was focused on the Ukraine crisis, the US midterms or whatever other “big story” the media decided was more important, a truly momentous shift took place in the global financial system. It might seem like a small step on the surface, but it has the potential to bring about a real and possibly irreversible sea change in the way we use money; or better said, the way it uses us.

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Tax Cuts Do Not Cause Inflation. Printing Does.

2022-12-14

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2022-12-14

The narrative to attack any tax cut and defend any increase in government size is reaching feverish levels. However, we must continue to remind citizens that constantly bloating government spending and increasing the size of monetary interventions are some of the causes of the widespread impoverishment of the middle class.

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The “Barbarous Relic” Helped Enable a World More Civilized than Today’s

2022-12-13

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2022-12-13

One of history’s greatest ironies is that gold detractors refer to the metal as the barbarous relic. In fact, the abandonment of gold has put civilization as we know it at risk of extinction. The gold coin standard that had served Western economies so brilliantly throughout most of the nineteenth century hit a brick wall in 1914 and was never able to recover, or so the story goes.

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Mises’s Critiques of Social Darwinism and of the Concept of Class Struggle

2022-12-13

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2022-12-13

In his 1922 book, Gemeinwirtschaft, Ludwig von Mises unmasks the intellectual distortion that is social Darwinism. Based on determining the dynamics of socialization through the principle of the division of labor, Mises shows that society is cooperative; that peace, not war, is the father of human progress.

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The World Needs More Energy and Less Energy Regulation

2022-12-12

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2022-12-12

Energy is a highly regulated industry across the world. There is less debate about the need for government control when it comes to the oil and gas sector. The arguments that most people accept for government intervention in energy, whether in the name of energy access, national security, or climate change mitigation, all share the same general premise: that energy is too important to be left to the whims of the free market. 

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Leitrim GAA Podcast: Andy Moran – Sn 3 Ep 1

2022-12-11

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To kick start season three of the Leitrim GAA Podcast, Senior Football Manager Andy Moran drops in to chat through the departures and newcomers to the Leitrim panel for next season, along with some changes to his backroom staff as they prepare during an busy off season. Moran speaks about the changes to the panel and backroom staff as they look to build on the growth shown this year, 12 months on from his appointment Moran is not putting the feet...

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The Corporate Fairy Tale Is Dying as Economic Reality Sets In

2022-12-10

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2022-12-10

At least since 2008, the financial world has been in a financial spiral caused by central banks’ growing monetary impression. As a consequence, key economic concepts (e.g., that business cycles are caused by credit expansion, and higher prices by monetary expansion) started to be considered just “old ideas” and their defenders prophets of the apocalypse.

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The G7 Cap on Russian Oil Is a Subsidy to China

2022-12-10

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2022-12-10

There are many mistakes in the G7 agreement to put a cap on Russian oil. The first one is that it does not hurt Russia at all. The agreed cap, at $60 a barrel, is higher than the current Urals price, above the five-year average of the quoted price and higher than Rosneft’s average netback price.

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Digital Currency: The Fed Moves toward Monetary Totalitarianism

2022-12-09

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2022-12-09

The Federal Reserve is sowing the seeds for its central bank digital currency (CBDC). It may seem that the purpose of a CBDC is to facilitate transactions and enhance economic activity, but CBDCs are mainly about more government control over individuals. If a CBDC were implemented, the central bank would have access to all transactions in addition to being capable of freezing accounts.

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Fiat and Gold: Two Fixes for a Broken US Monetary Base

2022-12-08

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2022-12-08

In the laboratory of history, great inflation followed by great disinflation opens the road to monetary regime change. Sometimes the road leads to a better place. Think of the US return to gold in 1879 following the inflationary issue of greenbacks during the Civil War; or the era of the hard deutsche mark when the German Bundesbank responded to the great inflation and bust of the late 1960s and early 1970s by insulating its money from continuing...

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Do Falling Prices Cause or Predict a Recession?

2022-12-07

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2022-12-07

In the midst of excessive US economic and geopolitical uncertainties due to rampant inflation and the continuing Russian invasion of Ukraine, the 7.7 percent October inflation report comes as a small relief. The unemployment rate touched 3.7 percent in October, remaining near the 3.5 percent prepandemic level and slightly above the 3.4 percent natural rate of unemployment of the fourth quarter of 2021.

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“Classical Liberalism” Will Never Satisfy the Left

2022-12-06

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2022-12-06

“Today the tenets of this nineteenth-century philosophy of liberalism are almost forgotten. In the United States “liberal” means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations.”

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