The Bank of Japan has been pursuing a monetary policy of “yield curve control” (YCC) since 2016, with which it keeps short and long-term interest rates for Japanese debt securities at around 0 percent. To do this, it buys massive amounts of government bonds. The Central Bank of Australia has been proceeding in a very similar way since March 2020. It keeps the three-year interest rate at 0.1 percentage points through bond purchases.
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Peter G Klein is Carl Menger Research Fellow of the Mises Institute and W.W. Caruth Chair and Professor of Entrepreneurship at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business. He is also senior research fellow at Baylor’s Baugh Center for Entrepreneurship and Free Enterprise and adjunct professor of strategy and management at the Norwegian School of Economics. His research focuses on the economics of entrepreneurship and business organization, with applications to innovation, regulation, and economic growth.
In the past couple of months, our esteemed public health experts have had a rough go of defending the supposedly settled science behind lockdowns and mask mandates.
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Murray Rothbard was a polymath, and philosophy is one of the fields to which he made important contributions. When people think of him as a philosopher, though, they often have in mind only his work in ethics and political philosophy, found, for example, in The Ethics of Liberty. His work in this area is of great significance, but he wrote about other areas of philosophy as well, and in this week’s article, I’d like to consider an important argument he made in epistemology, the theory of knowledge.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been constantly bombarded by news reports and “expert” analyses celebrating an incredible global economic recovery. They’re not even presented as projections or expectations anymore, but as a fact, as though the return to vibrant growth were already underway. Stock markets certainly seem to agree, going from record high to record high while all the political and institutional leaders congratulate themselves on a job well done.
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[Editor’s Note: following reports that the Biden administration is planning to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigarettes, the following is an article by Murray Rothbard written in August 1994.]
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