Mark Skousen has been the leading advocate for better measures of economic activity ─ measures that better reflect an Austrian-Say based perspective of how an economy actually works ─ measures that better reflects the importance of production and investment in driving the economy and employment. His preference, gross domestic expenditure (GDE), as highlighted in his The Structure of Production.

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and propertylocated in the United States -- decreased at an annual rate of 2.9 percent in the first quarter of 2014 according to the “third” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

CNN reports today that in China they plan to build the world’s tallest skyscraper. It has been designed to be very environmentally friendly i.e. green, and will be in the color pink.

So many anniversaries of meaning this summer! We now approach the hundredth anniversary of the shots that killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo. These shots, of course, precipitated the cataclysm we call the Great War. The shooter was Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb nationalist a few days from his twentieth birthday. Since Austro-Hungarian law did not permit the death penalty for persons under age twenty, Princip was tried, given a twenty-year sentence, and sent to the Bohemian fortress-prison of Terezin, confined to a tiny cell.

From my Mises Canada article yesterday, I address the question of whether bank deposits are idle? Or are they held for a reason, albeit a reason that the depositor might not know about yet?

Advocates of fractional-reserve banking err in claiming that deposits are “idle”. The prevailing belief amongst this group is that depositors don’t have any present need for their funds, and so they give them to the bank to care for them (or invest) until that point in time when they do need money.

Writing for the Globe and Mail, Tom Bradley is worried about the markets:

Writing in the Financial Times this weekend, John Authers is concerned with the lack of volatility in the stock market.

 Just as Professor Bernanke exits center stage at the end of Act I of the monetary comedy he created, the scene shifts to Frankfurt. The star of Act II is European Central Bank (ECB) chief Mario Draghi. As we pick up the story, Mr. Draghi has been launching a defense against a phantom threat of deflation.

Ha-Joon Chang, development economist at Cambridge University, has published a new book: Economics: The User’s Guide. The Huffington Post publishes a selected excerpt that makes for utterly terrifying reading.

The Federal Reserve System turned 100 years old last December and Fed supporters have been celebrating ever since.