The Idiocy of Wall Street: Applauding Its Own Demise

Given the economics discussed below, and the government’s lack of credibility to date, the real costs will now clearly run into the high trillions. The question is, who will get stuck with the losses and how will that loss-distribution process be handled? For Wall Street to applaud the prospect of the upcoming events is lunacy. Why is anyone listening to Paulson and Bernanke?

The Mystery of Banking

Conventional money-and-banking textbooks confront the hapless reader with a jumble of dumbed-down mainstream theories and models. Rothbard will have none of this shabby and disrespectful treatment of his reader and of his science. The time is finally ripe to publish this new edition of the book that asked the forbidden question about the Fed.

Hayek’s Legacy

Economics never labels anything any more. Well, more accurately, it does; only now it hardly ever uses labels formed from people’s names. Hayek’s ideas, however, are seamlessly intertwined with so much of modern academic economics that, indeed, practically everyone in the profession has come into contact with or uses (lowercase) hayekian insights. What this does for intellectual history is likely unfortunate.

Hayek on the Business Cycle

Friedrich A. Hayek was barely out of his twenties in 1929 when he published the German versions of the first two works in this collection, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle and “The Paradox of Saving.” The latter article was a long essay that was to become the core of his celebrated book and the third work in this volume, Prices and Production, the publication of which two years later made him a world-renowned economist by the age of thirty-two. But the young Hayek did not pause to savor his success.

Wrong Lessons from Professor Stiglitz

The recent collapse of financial giants Lehman and AIG have led to new calls for regulation. Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has proposed a six point plan to deal with the current financial situation. He believes that the government needs to “correct the incentives for executives” by requiring that bonuses be paid on five year returns, rather than on annual returns. We need a “financial products safety commission”.

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