Here is Paul Krugman from his blog trying to deny that he was a persistent advocate for the housing bubble and below that are quotes from him just prior to the bubble taking off. ht Benjamin Lee ============================================== “And I was on the grassy knoll, too” One of the funny aspects of being a somewhat, um, forceful writer is
Dubai is delaying payment on its debts and that has sent stock markets around the world lower. This could be a trigger that reverses the remarkable bear market rally that has taken place since March. Dubai was also the location of the crisis signal in the Skyscraper Index in August 2007. Things have become increasing less optimistic in what was
The CPI rose three tenths of one percent in October and one of the big factors was the rise in used car prices. Used car prices increased 3.4% in October. This is no doubt due to the hundreds of thousands of cars taken off the market and destroyed by the cash for clunkers program. This is good news for those trading in used cars to buy a brand new
Niall Ferguson the famous Harvard historian appears to be reading Mises.org. Not only is his Newsweek article painfully realistic regarding the prospects for the American Empire, but he also quotes Paul Krugman–the exact same quote that Ben Lee dug up and published on Mises.org . =========================== From page 3-4 of Ferguson: Now, who said
I just came across a letter from a mainstream economics journal from 2003 rejecting my paper “Skyscrapers and Business Cycles.” It reads in part that “this journal focuses upon specification and testing of formal macro and monetary models and does not publish papers like yours in which the theorizing and testing is more casual-descriptive than
Here : “In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf
The ‘Skyscraper Curse’ strikes again There is often a correlation between financial bubbles bursting and attempts to construct the world’s tallest building, says William Pesek on Bloomberg.com. In 1931, for instance, the Empire State building, designed in the exuberant 1920s, finally opened, “presaging years of gloom”. The Sears Tower was the
What Goes Straight Up? Graphs of economic statistics usually meander across the page like a walk through the forest; others will wiggle up and down with the business cycle like an EKG machine. Only recently have we been confronted with statistics that shoot up vertically, like a lie on a polygraph test. Statistics such as the monetary base and the
When researchers compared the Shanghai Ranking of World Universities to budgetary constraints they found a number of important, but not surprising results. The Shanghai Ranking includes things like the number of patents and Nobel Prize winners a university generates along with citations to faculty publications. Among European universities, those
Current Austrian economists are the true heirs to the neoclassical economics that thrived up through the 1930s. It was in the spirit of Carl Menger and stressed the discovery of true causal laws that explained real economic phenomena such as business cycles. By the 1950s this Mengerian-neoclassical mainstream had been hijacked by positivists,
What is the Mises Institute?
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.