Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

Despite massive government and central bank stimuli, the global economy is seeing a concerning rise in defaults and delinquencies. The main central banks’ balance sheets (those of the Federal Reserve, Bank of Japan, European Central Bank, Bank of England, and People’s Bank Of China) have soared to a combined $20 trillion, while the fiscal easing announcements in the major economies exceed 7 percent of the world’s GDP according to Fitch...

Read More »

“Our country continues to face a difficult and challenging time….People have lost loved ones. Many millions have lost their jobs. There is great uncertainty about the future. At the Federal Reserve, we are strongly committed to using our tools to do whatever we can, for as long as it takes…to ensure that the recovery will be as strong as possible, and to limit lasting damage to the economy” –Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, June 10,...

Read More »

The political theorist Michael J. Sandel is a popular teacher at Harvard, and his lectures circulate widely on YouTube and elsewhere. He attracted attention as a serious political theorist with his critical work on John Rawls, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982). As most readers will know, I’m no fan of Rawls, and it’s easy to find poor arguments in his A Theory of Justice. But Sandel totally misunderstands him, and his attack on Rawls...

Read More »

The essential fallacy of John Maynard Keynes and his early disciples was to cultivate the monetary equivalent of alchemy. They believed that paper money was a suitable means to alleviate the fundamental economic problem of scarcity. The printing press was, at any rate, under certain plausible conditions of duress, a substitute for hard work, savings, and cutting prices (Hazlitt 1959, 1960).

Read More »

[This article is part of the Understanding Money Mechanics series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in late 2020.] In chapter 8 we presented Ludwig von Mises’s explanation of how bank credit expansion causes the boom-bust cycle, what is now known as Austrian business cycle theory. However, the reigning view today in both academia and the popular media is the Keynesian explanation, derived from John Maynard Keynes’s famous...

Read More »

Whining and complaining about inequality is a growth industry. Thomas Piketty’s book (or perhaps a large virtue-signaling paperweight), about how the rich are getting richer, achieved bestseller status and is now a movie. Understanding the flaws in the wealth inequality argument is increasingly important, because the communist wing of the Democratic Party is now openly advocating a wealth tax.

Read More »