Appropos of my recent blog earlier this week on the causes of China’s inflation, it has just been reported that March saw a surge in internal (yuan) currency loans by Chinese banks of 1.01 trillion yuan (equal to $160.1 billion) far above the 710.7 billion yuan lent in February. More significantly, this was the biggest deviation of actual from forecast loans in more than a year.&nbs
While government force may keep companies like AOL alive, consumers will surely be worse off.
Mises’s English-language writings are clear and direct, but he was not a gifted prose stylist like Schumpeter, Hazlitt, or Rothbard (or, for that matter, Keynes, who used sonorous phrasing to conceal murky thinking). Still, some characteristic Misesian expressions — “exploding the fallacy,” for instance — stick in the memory.
As I discussed recently, the costs and risks of maintaining the eurozone system are already immense and rising. So is an exit possible? Intuitively, the exit from the euro should be as easy as the entrance. Joining and leaving the club should be equally simple. Leaving is just undoing what was done before.
While it is still unclear where future developments will lead the EMU, the costs and risks of remaining within the system are already immense and rising.
Well, well, well, the Chinese economy is experiencing inflation. Overall consumer prices rose by 3.6 percent in March 2012, year-over-year, including an upsurge in food prices of 7.5 percent. Even the prices of venerable Chinese herbal medicines took an upward leap of 8.3 percent.
In his Bloomberg View column today, Economists Have a Lot to Learn from the Weather, Mark Buchanan chides economists for clinging to their neoclassical general equilibrium models in the wake of their spectacular failure to track the financial crisis.
Recent discussions in the econ blog world on whether the Fed keeping interest rates too low for too long from 2003-2005 was a significant factor in the most recent boom-bust episode, triggered by John B. Taylor’s March 31, “Policy Failure and the Great Recession,” reinforces how important and useful Austrian insights are for properly interpreting causes of the current crisis and guiding discussions of appropriate reforms in monetary institutions.
