Mises Institute Senior Fellow Alex Pollock joined Chicago’s Morning Answer this morning to talk about the failures of mainstream economics and the reckless policies of the Federal Reserve.
Finance and Philosophy: Why We’re Always Surprised is available now on Amazon.
The capital asset pricing model (CAPM) is an important investment model that describes how investors expect to be compensated for the time value of money and risk. The more risk you take, the more you want to be compensated. The formula is expressed as follows:
(A) Re = Rf + Beta * (Rm – Rf),
where Rf is risk-free return, Rm is the market return, and Beta is a risk element.
Language is a critical tool for communication among humans; we cry “watch out” when a speeding car hurtles toward a pedestrian. We also think of language as a cognitive tool for society at large, since all human learning is closely tied to how we learn and process language.
Libertarians have a reputation for denigrating traditional American institutions. They deride the Superbowl as “sportsball,” sneer at mass-market entertainment as “bread and circuses.”
It goes deeper than that. As Mises Institute president Jeff Deist says:
Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil wrote an essay in 2001, “The Law of Accelerating Returns,” that describes an exponential path to what for many is an unimaginable future.
How certain is the exponential he describes? “We would have to repeal capitalism and every visage of economic competition to stop this progression,” he says.
Is it possible to be too optimistic? In the case of Federal Reserve Governor Christopher J. Waller, he maintains the fabled soft landing is still possible. Quotes from speeches, testimony, or interviews from members of the Fed hardly age well, as is the case here, when he gave a talk at an economic summit in Idaho a few days ago:
