Many think cancel culture is an odd particularity of the academic world of the Anglosphere. If any place has yet been spared, it is eastern Europe. Eastern Europe has had its fair share of thought policing throughout its vivid history, and people there are usually more willing to take a stance against it. That is one reason why the Austrian Economics Meeting Europe has been held several times in eastern European cities, including Prague, Krakow, Budapest, and recently Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics released new Producer Price Index (PPI) data today, and it’s not good news for consumers.

The PPI is a measure of prices at the production phase of goods and services, and is often an indicator of where consumer prices are headed. Prior to 1978, the index was known as the Wholesale Price Index.

If you’ve never given much consideration to the power of central banking, it’s time to make that a priority. June 15 marks the start of the Fed’s balance sheet reduction. It’s important to understand what’s in store regarding the upcoming crisis and who’s to blame.

The average card-carrying Austrian would say that the Federal Reserve is creating money by the bale, with evidence being Consumer Price Index prints of 8.6 percent per the Bureau of Labor Statistics or over 15 percent per John Williams’s shadowstats.com computation based on the way the government calculated CPI back in 1980. Surely, at best, the US dollar is only the cleanest dirty shirt in the currency laundry basket.

Uvalde, Texas, is where I was born. It’s where my mom taught kindergarten less than a mile from Robb Elementary. Uvalde is where I learned to master a Daisy BB gun. I took that – that took two years before I graduated to a 410 shotgun. Uvalde is where I was taught to revere the power and the capability of the tool that we call a gun. Uvalde is where I learned responsible gun ownership. And Uvalde called me on May 24th, when I learned the news of this devastating tragedy.

Money supply growth fell slightly in April, falling below March’s eight-month high. Even with March’s bump in growth, though, money supply growth remains far below the unprecedented highs experienced during much of the past two years. During the thirteen months between April 2020 and April 2021, money supply growth in the United States often climbed above 35 percent, well above even the “high” levels experienced from 2009 to 2013.

When the Bourbon dynasty was restored to power in France in the early 1800s after Napoleon’s abdication, the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand famously said of that family: “They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” In modern economic parlance, one can say the same thing about progressives, who once again are demanding price controls to “fight inflation.”

(The following text is a revised update of an article that was first published in 2005.)

The recent outbreak of price inflation with the jump to an annual rate of 8.6 percent in May 2022 came as a surprise to the US central bank (the Federal Reserve). Having ignored the warnings of the Austrian school economists, the policy makers were paralyzed in the face of a phenomenon they deemed impossible to happen. None of their forecasting models had triggered an inflation alert.