Review
| SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2013
The Skyscraper Index: Edifice Complex

By ROBIN GOLDWYN BLUMENTHAL | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR
The U.S. has a new tallest building—One World Trade Center in New York—and that has conjured up some novel reading of economic tea leaves.

To some, a new skyscraper is a sign that hubris has again swept the land. The announcement last week that the U.S. has a new tallest building—the 1,776-foot-high World Trade Center, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat—conjured up a novel reading of economic tea leaves.

Guest Post: Galling Government

by Gary Galles

Americans live with paternalist government that nudges (and shoves) them to do what it deems best and “help” everyone with everything. But government is just flawed people with worse information and worse incentives than the individuals directly involved, putting reason and evidence on liberty’s side.

• Monday: Human Reason and A Priori Economics by David Gordon
• Tuesday: Europeans Looking To Inflate Their Debts Away by Andrew Cullen
• Wednesday: Lawyers, Film, and Money: Copyrighting the First Movies by Brian LaSorsa
• Thursday: 

Writes Robyn Blumenthal at Barron’s today:

As I explained in my Mises Daily article on Friday, on 15 November 1923, German hyperinflation was finally brought to a halt. That was 90 years ago. This image is titled: “Gutenberg and the billion press”.

They a picture is worth a thousand words. This is a picture of the government statistic on the Civilian Labor Participation rate. That rate is now at a 35 year low. The steep decline in the rate is indicative of people giving up hope of ever finding a job, so they stop looking for a job and therefore are no longer considered part of the labor force = (employed and unemployed).

On Monday, former Fed official Andrew Huszar publicly apologized to the American public for his seminal role in executing the QE program, a program he characterizes as “the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time,” and “the largest financial-markets intervention by any government in world history.” While this is a momentous admission from an insider (Mr. Huszar is also a former Wall Street banker), perhaps Mr.

On 15 November 1923 decisive steps were taken to end the nightmare of hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic: The Reichsbank, the German central bank, stopped monetizing government debt, and a new means of exchange, the Rentenmark, was issued next to the Papermark (in German: Papiermark). These measures succeeded in halting hyperinflation, but the purchasing power of the Papermark was completely ruined. To understand how and why this could happen, one has to take a look at the time shortly before the outbreak of World War I.