This has been a great election season. I don’t watch much local TV so I have not been inundated with the attack ads. Very few yard signs. Very little political discussion within my group of friends and colleagues. Additional good news is that the American people hate the Congress, support for the President is tanking so bad that he is not on the real campaign trail, and there is a general disgust for the special interest groups and their attack ads. The only thing I am really interested is the votes to legalize marijuana.

Contrary to what is commonly assumed, Austrian economics and Austrians scholars themselves are not necessarily in favor of gold-based monetary systems. The problem with fiat money is not that it isn’t gold, but that it’s fiat money. In general, Austrians favor free-market money, which may or may not mean gold specifically.

For once I agree with Paul Krugman, who writes: “success in business does not seem to convey any special insight into economic policy.” Unfortunately, everything in his latest column save that single sentence is completely wrong. What Krugman means is that Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, Mervyn King, Mario Draghi, and the other academic Keynesian policymakers were right about quantitative easing, bailouts, subsidies, etc.

Peter Boettke at Coordination Problem highlights a new IEA has publication by Pascal Salin,    Money and Micro-Economics that should be of interest to advanced readers of this blog.

Insights from Professor Salin:

General:

The housing boom is searching for ways to keep going. Prices for many high-end pieces of real estate are now out of reach for even the 1% of the super-wealthy.

During the last housing boom, terms were reset for the “little people” to make home ownership an attractive financial option. Mortgage maturities extended, down payments dropped, and of course every knows by now about the role that all-time low interest rates played in attracting people to debt-fueled spending.

Now we see similar changes taking place in the top-end of the real-estate market .

In the dystopian movie Rollerball, all the world is ruled by one giant corporate state “controlling access to all transport, luxury, housing, communication, and food on a global basis.”

Thanks to popular media and the errors of neoclassical economics, we are trained to accept this scenario, or one similar to it, often when we are told of the latest move by a mega-corporation to extend its market share.

Once in a while, the gold standard makes a comeback in the public eye. Most recently it’s happened in connection to Steve Forbes’ book, Switzerland’s referendum, and the approaching mid-term elections in the US.

The Bank of Japan announced an unexpected major increase in its Quantitative Easing policy increasing its purchases from 50 to 80 trillion Yen sending US stock markets to all time highs and Japanese markets to multi-year highs. Some people made a bundle because of the move, others lost a bundle.

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — U.S. investors scored a Halloween treat.

Just when the current “discussion” on economics by public intellectuals like Paul Krugman hits bottom, Business Week decides to dig the hole even deeper by lionizing John Maynard Keynes. Keynes, according to BW, had the theories that can “fix” the currently moribund world economy.

 The 2022 Olympics (i.e., the Winter Games) is now down to only two applicant nations: China and Kazakhstan. This follows the withdrawal of Norway after the taxpayers of Norway balked on ponying up the cash necessary to make the Olympics a playground for the world’s richest cronies and politicians.