Money and Banking

To be an Austrian has become oddly fashionable in recent days, observes Sean Corrigan, judging from the number of news reports thus describing commentators on economic and financial affairs. 

Price stability is a misleading and an inherently contradictory concept. When such a construct as the price index becomes the guiding post for central banks, they will tend to produce and reinforce the very instabilities they proclaim to fight.

Sean Corrigan shows how Rome and her history can give us a reaffirmation of our unshaken belief in the ability of Everyman, acting as a free individual, to repair all the damage ever done by history’s tyrants and their tax gatherers.

The theory of time preference, capital, technology and economic growth will be viewed through both theoretical and historical elements. People have a preference for satisfaction earlier as compared to satisfaction later. Capital goods allow greater production, but this requires saving now, not consuming now.

With the recent rate hike, the mainstream press obediently parrots the macroeconomic analysis offered by our friendly central planners at the Federal Reserve. The average citizen knows that he or she is not nearly smart enough to understand the complex interrelationships of various price indices, yield curves, consumer confidence, and so forth—that’s Greenspan’s job.

Gilligan's Island economics can provide useful thought experiments, writes B.K. Marcus, for the same reasons Robinson Crusoe economics has served as a staple of classical and Austrian School economics texts.

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.

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

In recent years an increasing number of economists have understandably become disillusioned by the inflationary record of fiat currencies. They have therefore concluded that leaving the government and its central bank power to fine tune the money supply, but abjuring them to use that power wisely in accordance with various rules, is simply leaving the fox in charge of the proverbial henhouse.