As the financial ripples following the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) continue to run through the financial sector, a predictable voice has weighed in on the affair, and, as always, giving bad advice. Elizabeth Warren, never one to skip a chance to publicly gnaw on a financial carcass, writes in the New York Times that the entire problem is lack of government regulation. Of course.
In his 1884 article “Mind as a Social Factor,” Lester F. Ward attacked the laissez-faire doctrine in an “inversion of values” that would have made Friedrich Nietzsche blush. “But how shall we distinguish,” Ward asked,
Georgia is a country at the intersection of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1921 and remained part of it until 1991. Military service was mandatory in the USSR because the Soviet leadership didn’t respect individuals’ lives and used them as mere pawns.
How should Congress assess the Federal Reserve’s track record as an investor in residential mortgage-backed securities (MBS)? Regardless of Fed spin, it merits a failing grade.
There has been much talk lately about the Great Depression. Not only because we are on the cusp of a recession, but comparisons have always been drawn to this ominous period of economic downturn. The best action we can take as economists is to study it, and Murray Rothbard did just that. America’s Great Depression, published in 1963, contains many valuable lessons that still hold true today for preventing and dealing with depressions.
On March 15, 2020, The Federal Reserve announced that the legal reserve requirement for banks was being lowered to zero percent1 . In 2023, the legal reserve requirement is still zero percent. With this policy change, banks can now effectively loan out their reserves infinitely, drastically increasing the money supply.
In the midst of an economic downturn caused by central banks interfering with the economy, economists and politicians have proposed a variety of proposed causes and remedies to these business cycles, many hoping to have their plans followed so as to achieve fame and government privilege. Though some are close to the mark as to what causes business cycles, with a few inadvertently stumbling upon the correct way to prevent them, the vast majority of these “antidotes,” in spite of being done by men with PhDs from top universities and receiving funding from various D.C.
