Chapter 22: Making Depressions Great Again
In 2010, I argued in “America’s Second Great Depression”1 that the US economy was in an economic depression and that it would likely continue for some time until economic policy was reversed. This was one of six papers organized as a symposium in honor of the late Larry Sechrest at the Southern Economic Association’s 2009 convention.
Chapter 23: String Theories
In 1993, Milton Friedman proposed his famous “plucking model”1 of the business cycle. To understand this theory, imagine a string or straight rising line on a graph that represents the potential growth of the economy.
Chapter 19: Housing: Too Good To Be True
[The original version of this chapter was published as “Housing: Too Good to Be True,” Mises Daily, June 4, 2004.]
Chapter 20: The Economics of Housing Bubbles
[This chapter originally appeared as “The Economics of Housing Bubbles,” in Housing America: Building Out of a Crisis, edited by Randall G. Holcombe and Benjamin Powell (New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Publishers, 2009), pp. 237–62. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.]
Chapter 18: “Bull” Market?
It was on a weekend during the winter of 2004 and I was getting suspicions of the coming of another Fed-induced bubble like the one of the late 1990s. Social psychology seemed to be becoming more optimistic. However, it was not perfectly clear if it was just a general boom throughout the economy, or a bubble in a particular sector. I decided to take a look for myself.
Dr. Guido Hulsmann joined the Tom Woods show last week to discuss his work on the cultural and political consequences to inflation - a subject often neglected by most economists.
To read more about Dr. Hulsmann’s work on the topic, check out his book The Ethics of Money Production.
When I was in Congress and had to regularly fly between DC and Texas, I was routinely subjected to invasive “pat-downs” (physical assaults) by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). One time, exasperated with the constant insults to my privacy and dignity, I asked a TSA agent if he was proud to assault innocent Americans for a living.
Chapter 16: Bubble-Bust in Japan
During the 1980s Japan was feared as an economic and technological powerhouse. Most observers attributed their stock market bubble and high growth rates to easy monetary policy, management style, and government managed technological development. Since 1990, the Japanese government has been fighting price deflation with monetary inflation and trying to increase growth by government deficit spending. By all accounts it has not worked.
Chapter 17: Who Predicted the Bubble? Who Predicted the Crash?
Science is prediction.
— Motto of the Econometrics Society
Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.
— Lao Tzu
In 2015, the Texas State government announced plans to create a “gold depository.” At the time, we reported this could be a significant step toward wider use of gold and silver as legal tender by essentially creating a parallel banking system based on precious metals.
