Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

Filter archive by: Show All Show only Articles Show only Videos

The Search for Yield

2020-06-10

by

2020-06-10

A no-holds-barred discussion of the economy after the coronavirus shutdown and George Floyd protests. Are we facing another Great Depression? Can there be a V-shaped recovery or is this wishful thinking? What will all the new money and credit created by Congress and the Fed mean for the dollar? What kind of economic mess will Trump or Biden inherit in 2021? How far will Fed chair Powell go to keep markets propped up?

Read More »

Central Bankers Gone Wild: It’s a New Era at the Fed

2020-06-09

by

2020-06-09

Editor's Note: We keep hearing from the Fed's defenders that the current spate of new stimulus and bailouts from the central bank are really not a big deal and are all very prudent and moderate. I asked Senior Fellow Bob Murphy to provide some much needed perspective.

Read More »

The Importance of Economic Theory in Understanding Historical Data

2020-06-09

by

2020-06-09

It is a common belief that sound economics must be based on facts and not on theoretical reasoning as such. Some commentators are dismissive of economic analysis that is not derived from the true data, since it is not describing the facts of reality as depicted by historical data. The use of the free market economy framework, without the central bank and government intervention and with businesses as a foundation to derive valid conclusions, is...

Read More »

Why GDP Metrics Won’t Tell Us Much about the Post-COVID Recovery

2020-06-08

by

2020-06-08

In seeking to measure everything, econometricians gave us the dubious gift of gross national product and gross domestic product, the latter being in fashion today and the former in times past. Although there are different ways of measuring it, GDP is commonly taken as a measure of spending, comprised of household spending, government spending, investment spending, and net exports.

Read More »

Entrepreneurship in the Time of COVID-19

2020-06-07

by

2020-06-07

Per Bylund, author of The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized: How Regulations Affect Our Everyday Lives has commented extensively here at mises.org, and in a variety of entrepreneurship-focused publications, about the economics of entrepreneursip. Editor Ryan McMaken recently asked Professor Bylund to comment on what challenges entrepreneurs face right now in a rapidly changing legal and economic landscape.

Read More »

The Media Has Conveniently Forgotten George W. Bush’s Many Atrocities

2020-06-06

by

2020-06-06

Former president George W. Bush has returned to the spotlight to give moral guidance to America in these troubled times. In a statement released on Tuesday, Bush announced that he was “anguished” by the “brutal suffocation” of George Floyd and declared that “lasting peace in our communities requires truly equal justice. The rule of law ultimately depends on the fairness and legitimacy of the legal system. And achieving justice for all is the duty...

Read More »

The German Court’s Unexpected Blow to the ECB

2020-06-04

by

2020-06-04

A high German court recently ruled that the European Central Bank has overstepped the bounds of its power. The angry response from high-ranking European bureaucrats tells us a lot about what they want for the EU. This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros. Original Article: "The German Court's Unexpected Blow to the ECB"

Read More »

In Gold We Trust, 2020 – The Dawning of a Golden Decade

2020-06-03

by

2020-06-03

The New In Gold We Trust Report is Here! The In Gold We Trust 2020 report by our good friends Ronald Stoeferle and Mark Valek was released last week. It is the biggest and most comprehensive gold research report in the world.

Read More »

There’s No End in Sight to the Zombie Economy

2020-06-02

by

2020-06-02

The United States was waiting for the zombie apocalypse. The country was given a coronapocalypse instead. But could the two events merge and provide the nation with a dangerous economic trend? Corporate America’s worst-kept secret had been the swelling number of zombies kept on life support and hidden away during the boom phase of the business cycle.

Read More »

Michael Flynn, Lori Loughlin, and the Permanent Culture of Prosecutorial Abuse

2020-06-02

by

2020-06-02

When US attorney general William Barr recently announced that the Department of Justice was reversing course and dropping all charges against former Trump adviser Michael Flynn, the response from Democrats, the mainstream news media, and Never-Trump Republicans such as David French was thermonuclear, to put it mildly.

Read More »

Two Analogies for the Economy That the Media Keeps Getting Wrong

2020-06-01

by

2020-06-01

In an attempt to maintain the lockdown and their authority over our lives, politicians, health experts, and the mainstream media have been misusing some unusual analogies to describe the current economy. By using these analogies, our political overlords hope they can continue to keep the economy shut down, force companies to produce what the government forgot to purchase before the virus hit, and toss out trillions of dollars of handouts and...

Read More »

Defining “Inflation” Correctly

2020-06-01

by

2020-06-01

Inflation is typically defined as a general increase in the prices of goods and services—described by changes in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) or other price indexes. If inflation is a general rise in measured prices, then why is it regarded as bad news? What kind of damage can it inflict? Mainstream economists maintain that inflation causes speculative buying, which generates waste.

Read More »

Why Congressional “Oversight” of the Bureaucracy Is No Such Thing

2020-05-29

by

2020-05-29

I have long been fascinated by both public policy and the interesting crooks, crannies, and oddities found in the English language. Recently, I came across one such tidbit which connected both of those interests. Hugh Rawson, in "Janus Words—Two-faced English" on the Cambridge Dictionary blog, was discussing a number of English words that are sometimes called Janus words, after the Roman god depicted with two faces pointing in opposite directions,...

Read More »

How We Might Respond to a Panedemic Were Society Not So Dominated by the State

2020-05-28

by

2020-05-28

“There are no libertarians in an epidemic” crowed Atlantic reporter Peter Nicholas back on March 10, as he listed the numerous economic interventions the Trump administration was undertaking in the wake of the mounting COVID-19 crisis. This intervention, Nicholas declared, just goes to show you that whatever antigovernment talk one might talk, government intervention in the economy is “nothing new and, as may well prove the case this time around,...

Read More »

An unexpected blow to the ECB

2020-05-27

by

2020-05-27

Since the beginning of the year, the corona crisis has come to monopolize the news coverage to the extent that a lot of very important stories and developments either went underreported or were ignored altogether. One such example was the very surprising ruling out of the German Constitutional Court in early May, that challenged the actions and remit of the ECB.

Read More »

The Chicago School versus the Austrian School

2020-05-27

by

2020-05-27

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. People often ask me, How are the Austrians different from the Chicago School economists? Aren't you all free market guys who oppose big-government Keynesians?

Read More »

The Folly of “Ask What You Can Do for Your Country”

2020-05-26

by

2020-05-26

Recently, I was reminded of John F. Kennedy’s most famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” when I heard it among several famous sound bites leading into a radio show segment. It also reminded me that we will hear it more soon, as we are approaching JFK’s May 29 birthday. However, it is worth reconsidering what it means.

Read More »

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events

2020-05-25

by

2020-05-25

Abstract: Much of Shiller’s new book is about how economic narratives form, spread, and fade. Drawing on medical evidence about the spread of infectious disease, Shiller argues that “economic fluctuations are substantially driven by contagion of oversimplified and easily transmitted variants of economic narratives.” But Shiller ignores the powerful role of monetary disorder, whether in forming the narrative or determining the contagion rate, or as...

Read More »

The Japanese Love of Keynesian Economics Might Finally Be Coming to an End

2020-05-24

by

2020-05-24

Even those fortunate enough to have escaped infection by the Wuhan coronavirus will by now have noticed one of the virus’ many secondary effects: the disruption of the supply chain. Sick workers at meat plants, closed restaurants, hoarding, and the sudden spike in demand for things like ventilators, masks, and comestibles with long shelf lives have thrown the global flow of goods and services into disarray.

Read More »

Why an Economy Can’t Work without Market Prices

2020-05-24

by

2020-05-24

It has been a full century since Mises dropped the economic calculation bomb, but the argument apparently still haunts socialists. It should, since Mises managed to show that a socialist economy is not an economy at all but calculational chaos. Yet it is curious that it does, since most have (incorrectly) concluded that Mises’s argument, after decades of debate, was debunked.

Read More »