The turmoil in financial markets is eliciting the usual response from the central bankers, all up there in their Hueys, ‘Die Walkuere’ blasting out of their beat boxes. But the fixation on the ‘sub-prime’ angle and on the Fed’s role in isolation only tells part of the story. While wholly in agreement with the overall thesis of a credit expansion
Sorry to revisit the same topic so shortly, but in that same AA edition cited in my previous post, I simply cannot praise Garrett’s piece, entitled ‘Mythologies of Reconversion’, enough. This is not just a witheringly effective dismissal of the central planner’s and inflationist’s folies de grandeur , but one of the most evocative treatments you
Despite yet another half-point cut in interest rates from three of the world’s more important central banks--as well as various reductions from a host of their satellites--the noose is gradually tightening around banks and financial institutions everywhere, not just in the Asia, but in the U.S., Europe, and Canada, too, as news arrives of multiple
[Presented at Boom, Bust, and the Future: A Private Retreat with Austrian Economists, January 20, 2002.] In attempting an outlook for the year ahead--and Austrians firmly believe all such endeavors are an exercise in futility, given the complexity of the economy and the unknowable subjective valuations at work in human minds!--we will set out a
From either side of the Atlantic, two of the more influential proselytes of that degenerate old collectivist, John Maynard Keynes, have chosen to re-iterate all the old myths once again. ‘Now the corporate sector at large doesn’t merely want to reduce its net borrowings but actually in many cases wants to become a net saver. In the language of
Let us look at the fundamental question of how we characterize growth in the modern economy. Familiar usage and complacency of thought have allowed the idea to arise that any increase in prosperity can be measured strictly in terms of the macro-economic entity called Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This has led to a horrible inversion of means and
Here is what the standard historical textbooks will tell you. The Romans, after nearly four centuries of occupation, abandoned Britain in the year 410 a.d., when the western Emperor Honorius sent a “Rescript”—or official proclamation—to the leaders of the British municipalities, telling them, thereafter, to look to their own defense. Those same
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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.