Business Cycles
Displaying 781 - 790 of 890
Nowhere to Turn
The Federal Reserve System may have run out of room to maneuver. Facing a looming recession, it resolutely lowered its discount rate and frantically expanded its credits. Eager to stimulate the sagging economy, it enabled and encouraged businessmen to invest more and consumers to go ever deeper into debt. Yet the specter of recession refuses to fade away.
Explaining Japan’s Recession
Japan has experienced an Austrian business cycle, writes Benjamin Powell. For Japan's economy to recover the government must stop intervening in the economy and allow the market process to realign the structure of production to match consumer preferences.
Stabilize the Economy?
here are those who want to believe that a market economy is itself unstable, prone to periods of excess and in need of stabilization by some outside authority. As Jeff Madrick wrote recently for the New York Times, “government itself is a necessary bulwark against recession.”
Who is at Fault?
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?
The Campaign Against Cost Cutting
The alarm raised by mainstream economists that corporate cost cutting will undermine the real foundation of the economy is based on a flawed view of the essence of savings. On the contrary, writes Frank Shostak, cost cutting is an important means in correcting previous erroneous decisions so that real wealth can be generated again.
Nonsense from a Nobel
The June 3, 2002, issue of The Nation heralds the 2001 Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz as a "rebel with a cause." That characterization is certainly a stretch for an economist, who is former senior vice president of the World Bank and who adheres to orthodox Keynesian doctrine, the dominant economic paradigm of mainstream political and economic theory for the past 50 years.
Panic of 1819—and 2002
American business, once held in high regard and master of all it surveyed during the frenzied booming 1990s, suddenly finds itself cast upon the rocks. The economic cycle of boom and bust is fascinating stuff. Its essential elements are repeated endlessly throughout the dusty pages of financial history. All of this makes Murray Rothbard’s book, The Panic of 1819, particularly interesting, timely, and enlightening.
Sustainable Growth: or, How to Kill an Economy
The headlines of the business pages have been trumpeting the arrival of recovery now for months. How do the experts decide when recession has turned to recovery? By looking at the data, which come in packages labeled in various ways: the GDP, the leading indicators, the unemployment rate, industrial production, housing starts, commercial borrowings, office vacancy rates, and a host of others. If these tend in the negative direction, we are said to be entering a recession. If they move in a positive direction, it is said that we are recovering.
The Panic of 1837 and the Contraction of 1839-43
The standard interpretation of the Panic of 1837 and subsequent recession blamed state bank monetary inflation abetted by President Jackson's removal of the federal deposits from the Bank of the United States.
