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. The Mises Institute now offers regular updates on the TMS metric and its growth.1

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.

In order to make the data “talk,” economists utilize a range of statistical methods that vary from highly complex models to a simple display of historical data.

It is generally held that by means of statistical correlations one can organize historical data into a useful body of information, which in turn can serve as the basis for assessments of the state of the economy.

It is held that through the application of statistical methods on historical data, one can extract the facts of reality regarding the state of the economy.

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

This ambitious new book on the foundations of money and monetary institutions, based on the the author’s Ph.D. disseration defended in 2011 at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain (supervised by Gabriel Calzada), is an impressive interdisciplinary exercise. Part I of the book, “Metaphysics,” dwells into the nature, origin, and valuation of money.