One of the things I have said to my economics principles students for years is that economists don’t like the letter T. It has been a good way to reinforce an important idea to students, but this year, I am planning on flip-flopping a bit (in honor of the political season) and endorsing T in appropriate circumstances.

Today in my entrepreneurship PhD seminar we discussed the iconoclastic American economist Frank Knight. Though friendly with Hayek personally, Knight was a harsh critic of Austrian capital theory, particularly as formulated by Böhm-Bawerk and Hayek.

The average oil price last week came in at 45 dollars per barrel, according to the West Texas Intermediate measure, and oil prices dropped 3 percent yesterday due to declining demand. 

This means oil prices haven’t moved much at all since April, when the average weekly price was between 40 dollars and 44 dollars per barrel. 

In her recent address at the Jackson Hole monetary policy conference, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen suggested that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates by the end of the year. Markets reacted favorably to Yellen’s suggested rate increase. This is surprising, as, except for one small increase last year, the Federal Reserve has not followed through on the numerous suggestions of rate increases that Yellen and other Fed officials have made over the past several years.

August is now behind us, and as a sign of the fear central bankers share over the weakness found in the world’s major economies, there is no sign of any effort to rise target rates at central banks. 

The “true money supply” measure is a measure of the money supply pioneered by Murray Rothbard and Joseph Salerno and is designed to provide a better measure than M2.

Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 19, no. 2 (Summer 2016)

In a new twist, the presidential nominees from both major political parties have fallen for (or hope that the voters have fallen for) a time-worn fallacy, and have proposed government spending on infrastructure “to grow the economy and create jobs.” As David Stockman has shown, infrastructure in the United States is not “crumbling,” nor is spending on infrastructure disappearing.