Business Cycles

This year's Nobel laureates in economics, writes Frank Shostak, have contributed to further obscuring our understanding of the business cycle.

It was capitalism that finally ended the Great Depression, writes Tom DiLorenzo, not FDR's hair-brained cartel, wage-increasing, unionizing, and welfare state expanding policies. 

Frank Shostak explains what Mises meant when he wrote that: "The Santa Claus principle liquidates itself." Most individuals in the western world take the ample availability of goods and services for granted.

Just when the supposed threat of disinflation passed, now comes another frightful creation from the fearsome flation family: stagflation. Sean Corrigan explains.

Joseph Salerno writes about a long-term look at this conventional wisdom that shows that 90 percent of deflations since 1820 have not resulted in depression.

Booming home prices and record low interest rates are allowing homeowners to refinance their mortgages, "extract equity" to increase their spending, and lower their monthly payment! As one loan officer explained to me: "It’s almost too good to be true."

In a market economy, writes Robert Murphy, the interest rate is not merely a lever to stimulate or depress economic growth.

The Fed's recent decisions, writes Frank Shostak, are part of a new effort to conduct monetary policy in the absence of "shocks."

Presented as part of the Mises Institute’s Austrian Workshop seminar series on 22 June 2004 in Auburn, Alabama.

Sponsored by the Mises Institute and held in Houston, Texas; September 22-23, 1995.