Niall Ferguson holds a PhD in philosophy from Oxford, taught history at Harvard and NYU, and wrote perhaps the definitive biography of Henry Kissinger.

So, naturally, Bloomberg hired him to write on economics.

Starting Friday, the Mises Institute will be hosting the Austrian Economics Research Conference, an event I consider one of the highlights of the year. What makes AERC a particularly unique event is that it provides a platform for Austrian scholars—and intellectual allies—to present new, important work and to have it engaged with sincerely and honestly by other serious intellectuals. At a time when universities have become the most intolerant institutions toward intellectual freedom, environments like this have never been more important.

[This article is part of the Understanding Money Mechanics series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in 2021.]

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a name to reckon with. He has for over forty years made outstanding contributions to Austrian economics, philosophy, history, and sociology, all from a Rothbardian perspective. Murray Rothbard was his great mentor and friend, and no one among his Rothbardian contemporaries has had so wide a public impact.

For most commentators economic stability refers to an absence of excessive fluctuations in key economic data such as real gross domestic product (GDP) and the consumer price index (CPI).

An economy with constant output growth and low and stable price inflation is likely to be regarded as stable. An economy with frequent boom-bust cycles and variable price inflation would be considered as unstable.

The pace of global recoveries since 1975 has been slower and weaker, consistently every time, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Recoveries take longer and happen slower. At the same time, periods of crisis are less aggressive albeit more frequent than prior to 1975. Another interesting evidence of the crises and recoveries since 1975 is that almost all economies end the recession period with more debt than before.

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