Ten years after the outbreak of the global financial crisis, banks in the euro area have not recovered. The Euro Stoxx Financials is only 40% above its March 2009 low, well below its pre-crisis level (Fig. 1). By contrast, the S&P Financials index in the US has risen by 320%. The different fates of European and US financial institutions could be due to the different monetary and regulatory crisis therapies of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Fed.

Fig. 1: US and Euro Area Financial Stock Prices

Thank you, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Green New Deal (GND) she has unveiled is most illuminating. It is now unmistakably clear that AOC, Bernie Sanders, and other democratic socialists in the Democratic Party don’t want “socialism lite” but rather they want the federal government to take control of the “commanding heights” of the economy.

Was the New Deal responsible for segregated housing?

The War on Meat is back in action.

One year ago, I wrote about the “War on Meat” taking place around the West, where government agencies in tandem, with several plant-based activist groups, have made a concerted push to demonize meat. Some plans that they have put forward consist of taxing meat as a means of reducing meat consumption.

In a free, unhampered market, we could envisage that the economy would be subject to various shocks but it is difficult to envisage a phenomenon of recurrent boom-bust cycles.

According to Rothbard,

The Free Society. By Laurence M. Vance. Vance Publications, 2018. Xii + 468 pages.

Laurence Vance is best known for his work as a specialist on the King James translation of the Bible, but he is also an outstanding writer on libertarian issues. In The Free Society, he has collected a large number of his articles for the period 2005-2017, almost all of which first appeared first in LewRockwell.com or the Future of Freedom Foundation. The articles are well worth reading, as they display the author’s sharp mind and consistent outlook.

Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s 93nd birthday. He was an unforgettable friend, whose immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed in my experience. In a lecture on the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, he mentioned the common objection that the expansion of bank credit might have no effect, if investors anticipated trouble. After the lecture, I asked whether Mises had answered this point.