Booms and Busts

Mark Thornton asks whether precious metals are coiling for a breakout as fiat money, Fed policy, global flows, and market manipulation put pressure on gold and silver.

Mark Thornton traces today’s tangled web of paper money, debt, war, and AI malinvestment—from John Law’s Mississippi Bubble to the Fed’s latest distortions.

Mainstream economists believe that a market economy is by definition internally unstable. Austrians argue that the instability comes from outside intervention. Thus, Austrians can explain what is happening while others simply describe the events.

Mark Thornton argues the AI data-center bond boom is the latest techno bubble—cheap-money malinvestment dressed up as a new era.

World War I wrecked European finance and opened the door for the dollar to displace the pound. Patrick Newman follows Thomas Lamont and Paul Warburg’s ambitions for an imperial banking system, the Fed’s first inflationary boom and bust, and the 1920s high tide of the Money Lords.

Patrick Newman shows how liberty-minded reformers, once holding the levers of power, were pulled toward favoritism of their own.

Mark Thornton argues Washington’s political theater cannot paper over the mounting costs of war, sanctions, debt, and inflation.

Because of Keynesian inflationary bias, economists, politicians, and journalists celebrated the huge financial moves that Ben Bernanke made in 2008 and beyond to deal with the financial meltdown and its aftermath. But Bernanke’s moves didn’t help the economy; they made things worse.

Federal Reserve policy has been to expand credit out of nothing without regard for the real damage it does to the economy.

The familiar story pits western farmer-debtors against eastern merchant-creditors. Rothbard's evidence says the story is wrong.