Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The book was the result of twenty years of observation of human action and identification of the mechanisms and processes that lead to economic efficiency and to our well-being. The book was written at a time when guilds had not yet completely disappeared, even though it was already known that the guild system was a brake on innovation and freedom of...

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“Economics,” wrote Henry Hazlitt, “is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man.” True. No epoch is immune to the scourge of economic illiteracy. Yet, we find ourselves in a moment of especially unprecedented economic ignorance. We’ve come a long way since the days of Hazlitt’s editorializing in the New York Times. In the 1930s, believe it or not, the Times held the line on economic orthodoxy in the face of emergent quackery. Fast...

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Welcome to Whose Economy Is It, Anyway?, where the rules are made up and the dollars don’t matter. Or at least that seems to be the view of the Yellen regime. As Doug French noted last week, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was the canary in the coal mine. Over the weekend, Signature Bank became the third-largest bank failure in modern history, just weeks after both firms were given a stamp of approval by KPMG, one of the Big Four auditing firms. While...

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Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed on Friday and was shut down by regulators. It was the second-largest failure in US history and the first since the global financial crisis. Almost immediately, the calls for bailouts started to come in. (Since Friday, First Republic Bank has failed, and many other banks are facing collapse.) In fact, on March 9, even before SVB failed, billionaire investor Bill Ackman took to Twitter to insist a federal “bailout...

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Keynesians and other economists believe the central bank can influence economic growth via monetary policy but that it may bring inflation. Thus, if the goal is faster economic growth and lower unemployment, then the economy may pay the price with a higher inflation rate. There is supposedly a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment, described by the Phillips curve: the lower the unemployment rate, the higher the rate of inflation; conversely,...

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The second-largest collapse of a bank in recent history after Lehman Brothers could have been prevented. Now the impact is too large, and the contagion risk is difficult to measure. The demise of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is a classic bank run driven by a liquidity event, but the important lesson for everyone is that the enormity of the unrealized losses and the financial hole in the bank’s accounts would not have existed if not for ultra-loose...

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People say government is corrupt. If it were corrupt, it would be acting in ways contrary and detrimental to its purpose, and it would be possible to right the course. In truth, government acts in ways that befit its nature. Today’s governments are states ruling by legal coercion. There is another, unacknowledged “government” that works to govern our behavior peacefully, and it’s usually called the free market. But to states, the market—whether...

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