Bank Failures in Slow Motion
We’ve only had 294 failures this cycle, but it is a big deal: adjusted to current dollars, the Depression banking crisis was $100 billion, the S&L crisis was $923 billion, and the current crisis is nearly $8 trillion.
Faculty Spotlight Interview: John Brätland
John Brätland lives with his wife Rose Marie in Bethesda, Maryland. He is currently employed as a senior economist in the U.S. Department of the Interior in Washington, DC. Although he is a critic of war in general, his army experience earned him the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star (with the ‘v’ for valor) for his service in Viet Nam.
That Bernanke Speech
It’s here. Frustrated that “nominal interest rates cannot be reduced below zero,” he makes the case that “unconventional” approaches are needed (direct purchases of securities with freshly created, high-powered money). This is not a problem, he says, because the Fed “will take account of the potential costs and risks of nonconventional policies…”
If inflation goes wild, it is your fault for not trusting the Fed:
The Deal Breaker
Do you want to convince someone that anarcho-capitalism is the solution? Then you had better have a response to this very real situation:
Innovation Requires Economic Freedom
[Excerpted from chapter 16 of Theory and History (1957).]
The Definition of Economic Progress
[Excerpted from chapter 16 of Theory and History (1957).]
If Men Were Angels
[Excerpted from “If Men Were Angels,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, 2007.]
PPI Jumps – Talking Heads Say All is Well
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that the Producer Price Index (PPI) rose .4% last month. This inflation is exactly what Austrians would expect to result from Helicopter Ben running his dollar-printing presses at full speed.
How Do We Know What We Know?
Because the state is grounded in a network of lies, contradictions, deceptions, and conflicts, political systems are inherently in conflict with reality and must resort to intentional distortions of truth as a way of trying to appear coherent to a gullible public.
There Is No End to History, No Perfect Existence
All doctrines that have sought to discover in the course of human history some definite trend in the sequence of changes have disagreed, in reference to the past, with the historically established facts and where they tried to predict the future have been spectacularly proved wrong by later events.
