Every so often, I check my investment portfolio to see how it is doing. (I stay out of stocks these days, but that is due to my personal situation and is not to be taken as investment advice.) Portfolios are collections of various financial instruments that one is holding, and one always hopes that their value will head in the right direction over
Economists and pundits mistakenly call the Federal Reserve System’s security holdings a portfolio. It is anything but. Original Article: “The Fed’s Portfolio Is Nonexistent: The Fed Does Not Invest. It Destroys Investments” This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher
The Free Market 20, no. 11 (November 2002) As the markets continue to wallow in bear territory, and as consumer—and, more important, investor—confidence falls, writers and commentators of all stripes have weighed in to give their two cents’ worth concerning the key question: who or what is at fault? Not surprisingly, Democrats have
The Free Market 23, no. 7 (July 2003) No one can argue about the current moribund economy, complete with falling stock prices, nonexistent profits, layoffs, airline bankruptcies, and exploding federal and state budget deficits. People certainly have argued about the cause of this downturn, but few people have accurately pointed out why there is
The Free Market 18, no. 8 (August 2000) The president of the United States was ecstatic. Never had economic prospects in this country looked better. Unemployment was at its lowest level in years, the rate of inflation was relatively low, and the economy had grown continuously for almost eight years. No doubt, said the experts, this country was
The Free Market 19, no. 6 (June 2001) Myths are myths, whether told by storytellers or by Tom Brokaw on NBC Nightly News . Brokaw has recently taken to telling his viewers that the consumer is spending enough to prevent a recession. The reasoning goes as such: Confident consumers do not fear the future, which means they spend almost all (if not
The Free Market 20, no. 2 (February 2002) Economists are fond of writing open letters to politicians in attempts to lead them down “proper” policy paths. In 1930, a thousand economists signed an open letter to President Herbert Hoover asking him not to sign the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Hoover signed it anyway, creating one more disastrous
While Austrians and Keynesians don’t agree on a lot of things, there is one thing on which they both seem to agree: the US economy is sinking into the morass of depression. At that point, however, the agreement ends, as the two schools have very different explanations as to why this is happening. The Keynesians, through Paul Krugman and his New
While economics supposedly is a science involving logic, it seems to me these days that prominent economists pursue their points by employing logical fallacies. Thus it was that recently I came upon a blog post by Paul Krugman in which he uses a 1999 Milton Friedman interview to attack the Austrian business cycle theory. The logical fallacy is
When the U.S. economy dipped into an inflationary recession in 1969, Murray N. Rothbard in his introduction to the Second Edition of America’s Great Depression wrote that the Keynesian paradigm could not explain that phenomenon, but Austrian economics could explain what was happening. If Rothbard was correct — and he was — then one might believe
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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.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.
