With the creation of the BRICS bank and now the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the major economies of the world are hoping to lay the foundation for a multi-polar financial world beyond the unilateral control of the United States. Due to the enormous size of the US economy, coupled with the reserve status of the US dollar, the United States government has long been able to achieve strategic and military goals through flexing its financial power.

At the time of their publication, Hayek’s writings represented a significant split from Léon Walras’s theories of perfect competition and, generally, mainstream microeconomics. As Hayek explained, perfect competition is an economic model in which “we assume that state of affairs already to exist.” A certain competitive equilibrium is considered to be the goal to reach.

David Stockman is our guest this week on Mises Weekends in the first of a two-part interview. He is also speaking at our Mises Circle event in Stamford, Connecticut, next week, along with Jim Grant and Judge Andrew Napolitano (watch for free at Mises.org/Live). 

Additional links:

Mises Daily Friday by Ryan McMaken: 

Even if the global warming lobby is eventually able to prove their case for the existence of global warming, that would still do nothing to prove the necessity of their plan for global economic controls, and thus, the impoverishment of billions.

For as long as every living economist has been plying their trade, a single historical episode has been taken as an experimentum crucis. Latin for “crucial experiment”, it is what Isaac Newton used to call an observed outcome significant enough, by itself, of determining the validity of a theory. The event serving this function in present-day economics is the Great Depression.

Volume 18, Number 1 (Spring 2015)

Sweden and the Revival of the Capitalist Welfare State is the third updated (and first English) edition of Andreas Bergh’s well-researched book on the rise, fall, and return of the world-renowned Swedish welfare state. The work importantly traces the origins of the Swedish wonder, in which Sweden rose from being one of Europe’s very poorest to being the world’s fourth richest country in a period of 100 years.

Volume 18, Number 1 (Spring 2105)

ABSTRACT:  What Engelhardt calculates in his comment is not the Marginal Efficiency of Capital. Engelhardt incorrectly ranks investment projects by Present Value instead of Net Present Value. Engelhardt does not prove that Keynes has a wealth maximizing theory of investment, so his comment is not a successful defense of Keynes’s theory.

KEYWORDS: John Maynard Keynes, marginal efficiency of capital, net present value

JEL CLASSIFICATION: E12, E22, E52, E58

Louis Rouanet has translated his Mises Daily article from Monday into French. Now available at Contrepoints: “Paul Krugman et la France, une longue histoire d’amour.”