The Biden administration has certainly made the most misguided nomination for Comptroller of the Currency in history with its nominee, Saule Omarova. Professor Omarova has published proposals displaying deep ideological commitments which make her obviously unacceptable for this key responsibility in the banking system. Even after this has become
Should the government subsidize buying houses that cost $1.2 million? The answer is obviously no. But the government is going to do it anyway through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Federal Housing Finance Authority (FHFA) has just increased the size of mortgage loans Fannie and Freddie can buy (the “conforming loan limit”) to $970,080 in “high
Mises Institute Senior Fellow Alex Pollock joined Chicago’s Morning Answer this morning to talk about the failures of mainstream economics and the reckless policies of the Federal Reserve. Finance and Philosophy: Why We’re Always Surprised is available now on
The Federal Reserve creates and manipulates the dominant fiat currency of the world. It produces the inflation of its supply and the continuous depreciation of its purchasing power. It manipulates dollar interest rates and the cost of debt, makes elastic the availability of credit (especially during financial crises), finances the government, and
Published in The Wall Street Journal : Mr. Levy describes the Fed’s permanent problem: It doesn’t and can’t know what the natural rate of interest is. Everyone should pity the members of the Federal Open Market Committee, who must inwardly confess that they can’t know the answers, yet have to play their parts in the Fed melodrama nonetheless. Alex
In The Price of Time , Edward Chancellor has given us a colorful and provocative review of the history, theory, and the profound effects of interest rates, the price that links the present and the future, which he argues is “the most important price of all.” The history runs from Hammurabi’s Code which in 1750 BC was “largely concerned with the
While the nation is rightly worried about the proliferation of antisemitism on its college campuses, another higher education abuse also needs prompt attention. On Dec. 6 – St. Nicholas Day – President Biden handed student loan defaulters another $5 billion gift in debt forgiveness. The administration’s eagerness to win the votes of student loan
Although manipulating housing finance is not among the Federal Reserve’s statutory objectives, the U.S. central bank has long been an essential factor in the behavior of mortgage markets, for better or worse, often for worse. In 1969, for example, the Fed created a severe credit crunch in housing finance by its interest rate policy. Its higher
Hold up your hand if you think that the aggregate losses of an organization are an asset of that organization. No hands at all? Absolutely right. Losses are not an asset. That’s accounting 101. Yet the greatest central bank in the world, the Federal Reserve, insists on claiming that its continuing losses, which have accumulated to the staggering
This article is adapted from a lecture delivered to the Federalist Society: The Federal Reserve is a fundamental problem for the Constitutional order of the American Republic. How can it be that it considered itself able to unilaterally impose permanent inflation on the country, without legislative debate or approval? The shifting theories
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The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
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