Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s 93nd birthday. He was an unforgettable friend, whose immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed in my experience. In a lecture on the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, he mentioned the common objection that the expansion of bank credit might have no effect, if investors anticipated trouble. After the lecture, I asked whether Mises had answered this point.
The US Federal Reserve has signaled to financial markets that it wants to pause further monetary policy tightening for some time. Investors, however, take a somewhat different view of what the Fed is going to do: They assume that the Fed’s interest rates hiking cycle has come to an end. This is pretty bad news for holders of cash, savings deposits and bonds: It means that inflation-adjusted US interest rates will – if price inflation remains at current levels – remain zero or even in negative territory.
Tomorrow would have been Murray Rothbard’s 93rd birthday.
Though it’s been 24 years since his death, Murray continues to be prolific. After The Progressive Era, next to come is the long-lost 5th and concluding volume of his extraordinary history of early America, Conceived in Liberty.
Books on American history have continued to go downhill in the 40 years since Murray wrote his 5th volume, so this will be a bombshell: brilliant, original, revisionist. It also reads like a great novel, while being 100% true.
Millennials are the focus of everyone’s attention in the housing business. With birthdates from the early 1980’s to the mid-1990’s up to the early 2000’s, this is the group sandwiched between Generations X and Z, the sons and daughters of Baby Boomers. Wikipedia (what else?) claims, “the generation has been generally marked by an increased use and familiarity with communications, media and digital technologies.”
Every year Grove City College hosts the Austrian Students Scholars Conference, bringing together students to present their own research papers written in the tradition of the Austrian school.
Mises Institute Fellow Per Bylund delivered a keynote speech this year titled “What Entrepreneurship Means for Economics.”
With scarcely a month left until the date Britain is scheduled to leave the European Union, the monetary czars at the top of the world’s central banks are increasingly coming to terms with the fact that a ‘hard’, no-deal Brexit now seems to be the most likely outcome.
Much to the consternation of some Republicans, I periodically explain that the Trump Administration is – at best – a mixed blessing for supporters of limited government.
