Money and Banking

Part of the Brown Bag Seminar series. Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 10 February 2005.

Current monetary policy, writes Frank Shostak, is based on a theory of Knut Wicksell. How does Wicksell stack up to Mises?

The dollar may not die anytime soon but its capacity for lording it over all living things is ending.

There are some bright spots in the American economy, but look beneath the surface. Stefan Karlsson warns that the downside of bad policy may have been merely postponed. 

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.