Business Cycles

Recorded at Mises University 2010. Includes an introduction by Mark Thornton.

Or will we stick to principle, pay whatever price that involves, and leave the world a better place? I submit to you that anyone who has ever truly loved liberty has chosen the second course.

A more realistic view is that a housing boom and bust happened to strike a fragile financial system whose fragility was worsened by ill-conceived government interventions.

A satisfactory explanation of business fluctuations must not be built upon the fact that individual firms make bad investments.

It is true that there is such a thing as the corn-hog cycle and analogous happenings in the production of other farm products. But the recurrence of such cycles is due to the fact that the penalties which the market applies against inefficient and clumsy entrepreneurs do not affect a great part of the farmers. These farmers are not answerable for their actions because they are the pet children of governments and politicians. If it were not so, they would long since have gone bankrupt and their former farms would be operated by more intelligent people.

The belief of the advocates of credit expansion and inflation that abstention from further credit expansion and inflation would perpetuate the depression is utterly false.

"There can be no such thing as a Keynesian state on the gold standard, any more then a cocaine addict or compulsive gambler can be on a strict budget."

Bankers who engage in fractional-reserve banking really do create "money out of thin air." Austrian economics is superior to Marxism in every respect.

The British Currency School did not criticize the multifarious projects to lower or abolish interest by means of a banking reform.

"The discount of future goods as against present goods is a necessary and eternal category of human action."