In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, the economics profession suffered a blow to what reputation it had. But unlike most of his colleagues, Mark Thornton was vindicated by 2008. Mark has been a voice of sanity at times when the wild interventions of the Federal Reserve have caused otherwise sensible people to lose their minds.
This collection serves the valuable purpose of defending the market economy against the conventional view that freedom has failed us and we need still more controls. We had plenty of rules and bureaucrats on the eve of the financial crisis. A lot of good that did us. Pretty much none of them saw any problems on the horizon.
Maybe we should consider a real free market, with sound money and market interest rates, and abolish the giant bubble machine once and for all. Read Mark Thornton and you’ll entertain this and other forbidden thoughts.
From the Foreword by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Mark Thornton is the Peterson-Luddy Chair in Austrian Economics and a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute. He is the book review editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, and has authored seven books and is a frequent guest on national radio shows.
Mark Thornton argues Washington is trying to manage bond yields, suppress gold’s warning signal, and sell AI as an inflation cure—even as debt and malinvestment pile up.
Mario Innecco speaks with Dr. Mark Thornton, Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute, about the growing risks facing the global economy. We discuss the end of the 40-year bond bull market, soaring government debt, the AI bubble, inflation, war, and the consequences of decades of artificially low interest rates. Dr. Thornton explains why he believes the government bond bubble poses a far greater threat than AI, why central banks cannot simply inflate their way out of the debt problem, and how Austrian Business Cycle Theory helps explain today's increasingly distorted economy. We also discuss the growing risk of economic, political and social unrest—and why sound money, limited government and change from the bottom up may ultimately provide the way forward.
The argument for AI solving inflation runs through productivity: better technology lowers costs, so prices fall. Dr. Mark Thornton takes that apart.
The Skyscraper Curse: And How Austrian Economists Predicted Every Major Economic Crisis of the Last Century
by Mark Thornton
Mises Institute, 2018
hardback edition: 978-1-61016-683-6
paperback edition: 978-1-61016-684-3
large print edition: 978-1-61016-685-0
epub edition: 978-1-61016-688-1
Online edition, June 2018.
