Money and Banking

Thanks to relentless government intervention, the economy in Brazil is in deep trouble. Anyone familiar with Austrian business cycle theory, however, could have predicted the current troubles long ago.

We're being told to blame the current market volatility and emerging crisis on oil prices, China, and a "strong dollar." To find the real causes, though, we must look at central banks and at past mistakes and malinvestments.

Fear is in the air. Central bankers are warning of crisis, and while mainstream economists fear the falling prices that are on the horizon in our post-boom world, Austrians know that deflation and recessions are both inevitable and necessary.

Barron's is writing about skyscrapers and the Skyscraper Curse. They also quote me on the subject.

Following the discovery of the Americas, Spain began a 300-year period of booms, busts, war, and mercantilism. Only in the eighteenth century did the country begin to find prosperity through liberalization of trade and private property.

The global economy continues to wrestle with deflation, with

You may have heard about the Swiss referendum to end fractional reserve lending by Swiss commercial banks. It's a fascinating development, and another example of how average Swiss people can use the federal referendum process to force both the central legislature and the 26 cantons to consider citizen proposals—merely by gathering 100,000 signatures within 18 months.

The housing bubble has been replaced by a number of new bubbles. Among them is the auto loan bubble. Car loans now last longer than ever and are going to more people with bad credit. This might not end well.

Populism was in the air this week as ranchers in the Western US opposed the spread of federally-owned lands, and reformers in Switzerland look to a referendum on fractional reserve banking.

Many people know that the Venezuelan economy is subject to byzantine price controls and other regulations. But on top of it all is a highly complex, bureaucratic, and damaging system of government-controlled monetary exchange rates.