I just received my first copy of The Austrian, which replaces The Free Market as the flagship publication for Mises Institute members. If the first issue is any indication they will live up to their promise of a “bolder and more robust version of what you have known for decades.”
For more than thirty years The Free Market has been the Mises Institute’s flagship monthly publication for our members. Today we introduce The Austrian, a bolder and more robust version of what you’ve known for decades.
President Barack Obama, Phoenix, August 2013
Paul Krugman, CNBC interview, July 2012
Readers of Judge Napolitano’s outstanding book will at once be struck by its unusual title. What is the “suicide pact” referred to there? The phrase occurs in a famous dissenting opinion by Justice Robert Jackson. In Terminiello v. Chicago (1949), the Supreme Court held that the city of Chicago had wrongly restricted the free speech of an incendiary speaker. The claim that doing so was needed to preserve public order did not suffice, the Court maintained.
Earlier today I was looking through some old records, and I came across a flyer for a symposium in which I participated at Seattle University early in 1990. The flyer announced the symposium topic by asking: “A $3 Trillion National Debt: Does It Matter? What Can We Do About It?” The topic seemed timely enough, given that the gross federal debt had just passed the $3 trillion mark for the first time and was rising at a brisk pace. Back then, $3 trillion seemed like “real money,” so some people were rightly concerned about the consequences of such large and growing public indebtedness.
If domestic cost, mostly labor, does not adjust to the higher import prices resulting from the depreciation, exporters will gain, but this gain comes from reducing the real incomes of domestic workers. If these workers ultimately negotiate an increase in nominal wages to bring their real wages back up to before the depreciation, the gain to exporters will disappear. The depreciation has created only a temporary gain.
Savings has nothing to do with money. For instance, if a baker produces ten loaves of bread and consumes one loaf, his savings is nine loaves of bread. In other words, the “savings” in this case is the baker’s real income (his production of bread) minus the amount of bread that the baker consumed. The baker’s savings now permits him to secure other goods and services.
The announcement of the euro-QE was not the start of Europe’s monetary Dark Age. That started many years ago with Chancellor Kohl’s undermining of the “hard deutsche mark Bundesbank” in the late 1980s. The darkness further descended when the newly created European Central Bank (ECB) implemented monetary frameworks which essentially tied Europe into a global 2-percent-inflation standard, following the US Federal Reserve.
