Obtaining a loan from the government now seems perfectly normal to most Americans, be the loans for education, business, healthcare, or whatever else.

Examples include Small Business Administration loans, where a potential business owner goes to the government to get startup cash, and student loans, where a college student borrows money for tuition or even living expenses. These loans can often be paid back with interest over the course of what is often several decades.

Mark Thornton explains to The Daily Caller what the ECB (and the Fed) are up to:

“The real economy is not helped with easy-money policies such as the ECB’s”, says Mark Thornton, economics PhD and Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute in Alabama.

Mark Thornton has been making the rounds as usual, with a variety of new podcast and radio interviews across the country. Here are the most recent links: 

The Economic Rock Star Podcast, Feb 9, 2015 

The Russ Belville Show, Feb. 6, 2015. 

Yesterday when I went for my infusion, I brought two items of reading material with me; The Wall Street Journal and the SSRN un-gated version of the Steve Horwitz’s forthcoming paper in the Spring 2015 issue of Social Philosophy and Policy, “Inequality, Mobility, and Being Poor in America.” The paper is one of the best summaries of a very common sense approaches to the data and the issue and is highly recommended to any who want to be well informed.

The old Keynesian idea that war is good for the economy is not taken seriously by anyone outside the New York Times op-ed page. But much of the discussion still focuses on macroeconomic effects (on aggregate demand, labor-force mobilization, etc.). The more important effects, as we’ve often discussed on these pages, are microeconomic —namely, resources are reallocated from higher-valued, civilian and commercial uses, to lower-valued, military and governmental uses.

Philipp Bagus writes: 

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard details the increasing level of Greek defiance to its ECB overlords in the wake of a left-wing, populist uprising in recent Greek elections. It has become blatantly obvious that the political, legal, fiscal, regulatory, and monetary centralization project known as the EU has increased rather than decreased nationalist impulses in Europe.

Gentrification gets bad press. It would appear that the gentrifier (he who engages in gentrification) is a malign exploiter, a bully, someone who takes advantage of the weak and the poor. And these are the nice things said about him.

Philipp Bagus, author of The Tragedy of the Euro recently spoke with the Mises Institute about recent developments in Switzerland and the European Monetary Union.

Mises Institute: In January, the Swiss central bank unpegged the franc from the euro. What does this mean for the future of the Swiss franc?