It is so long since the long-term interest rate market was free of Fed intervention that the meaning of freedom has become deeply blurred. Many commentators suggest that the much talked about multi-year program designed by the Yellen-Fischer Fed to reduce that institution’s balance sheet is in fact synonymous with the road back to freedom for long-term rates. That is just not so.

Economists have long played semantic games with business cycles. In particular, they try to downplay the significance of the crisis and to obfuscate its cause.

First of all, bubbles and economic crises are initially denied and then usually not named until after they end and particular sectors of the economy are revealed to be what Lionel Robbins called “a cluster of entrepreneurial errors.”

In a recent article I advocated for a new way of naming business cycles. The new approach emphasizes the cause rather than the effect. So instead of the “housing bubble” and “financial crisis,” we should refer to the Greenspan-Bernanke Crisis. Here we will turn our attention to the current situation.

According to Ludwig von Mises,

In my article “The Evil of Killing Children,” I pointed out how the US government, in an attempt to achieve regime change in Iraq, knowingly and intentionally killed hundreds of thousands of innocent children in Iraq.

Unfortunately, killing those innocent Iraqi children was not the only evil action taken by US officials regarding the Iraq sanctions. They also went after an American man for trying to help the children that US officials were trying to kill with their sanctions.

A recent surge in breakdowns, delays and overcrowding at New York’s subway system — in conjunction with a steady stream of rate hikes — has left many New Yorkers fuming and seeking answers.

A hundred years ago, the First World War was reaching its crisis. Though we tend to think of the war in terms of stalemate and attrition, the war was a complex web of human activities and human choices that seemed anything but static to most of the millions of participants. An illustration of this idea, in the broadest sense, can be seen in trends and events during the first half of 1917, just one hundred years ago. Taken as as a whole, the first six months of 1917 represents a startling shift in the shape of the war.

This week the Mises Institute held our annual Rothbard Graduate Seminar, a week-long event where scholars dedicated a week to studying and discussing a great economic treatise. This year’s focus was Human Action, Ludwig von Mises’s masterpiece that built the intellectual foundation for modern Austrian economics. Discussion focused not only on what makes the Misesian framework different from other economic schools of thought, but also applied those ideas to modern day debates on topics such as the proper use of economic modeling, deflation, and NGDP targeting.