Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

You might rightfully wonder: How can a bank, like the neighborhood bank down the street, “create money out of thin air”? To answer that question, we must enter the magical kingdom of “fractional-reserve banking,” where deposits are turned into loans, loans are turned into money, and so on. For every old dollar that goes in, nine new dollars come out, created with the stroke of a pen or the click of a mouse. As you may be aware, general deposits are...

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All too often, unscrupulous businesses weaponize the United States’ antitrust laws—which are only supposed to be utilized to protect consumers against higher prices and other consequences of monopoly power—for their own self-serving purposes. Professor Thomas DiLorenzo explained this problem more than a third of a century ago in a piece titled “The Rhetoric of Antitrust.” He wrote that “In theory antitrust regulation promotes competition in the...

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To explain Japan’s economic problems, Paul Krugman employed a model that assumes people are identical and live forever. While admitting that the model is not realistic, Krugman nonetheless argued that his model could still offer solutions to the crisis. In The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics, David Gordon wrote that Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk believed economic concepts must originate from reality and should be traced to their ultimate...

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The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on Wednesday left the target policy interest rate (the federal funds rate) unchanged at 5.25 percent. This "pause" in the target rate suggests the FOMC believes it has raised the target rate high enough to rein in price inflation which has run well above the Fed's arbitrary two-percent inflation target since mid-2021.  Yet, at Wednesday's press conference announcing the FOMC's...

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Everything seems to be lining up perfectly for individual investors with Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy making a debt ceiling deal. In fact, a sentiment poll reflects an ebullient investor class. According to an Investors Intelligence article titled "Assume the Positioning" (reprinted in Almost Daily Grant’s, June 1, 2023), “Just 23.3 percent of respondents are bearish on stocks, the lowest since January 2022, [when] the market scaled the...

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Most people agree that we are closer to nuclear war than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Some would even argue that we are closer now than we were in those fateful days, when Soviet missiles in Cuba almost triggered a nuclear war between the US and the USSR. In those days we were told that we were in a life-or-death struggle with Communism and thus could not cede a square foot of territory or the dominoes would fall one-by-one...

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There is a sea change in how society views false accusations of sexual abuse. And it’s about time. The lawsuit John C. Depp, II v. Amber Laura Heard (2022) points to this transformation. Depp and Heard sued each other for defamation with “actual malice” over public accusations of domestic violence (DV) during their marriage; Heard also sued Depp’s attorney for making false statements. Unlike an earlier case brought by Depp in the United Kingdom,...

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I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.—Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan California continues to attack businesses and entrepreneurial freedom. Leviathan has awakened, this time with Assembly Bill 257, promoting a state-controlled trade union for all restaurant workers. Current United States secretary of labor Marty Walsh has left and become head of the National...

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Since 1960, Congress has raised the debt ceiling 78 times, according to Bloomberg. The process of increasing the debt limit has become so regular that markets barely worry about it. Furthermore, as the 2011 debt ceiling crisis showed, the impact on asset prices happened mostly in emerging economies. In 2011, Turkish and Indian debt were the most negatively impacted, while Treasuries rose. Politicians believe that raising the debt ceiling is a...

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