[In recent months, Senior Fellow Mark Thornton has been covering today’s economy in detail in his Minor Issues podcast, so we asked him some questions about where the economy is headed now.] Mises Institute : You’ve become notable for the idea of the “skyscraper curse,” which is an illustration of how an inflationary economy can lead to more and
Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome “Jay” Powell, recently sent mysterious shock waves into financial markets with comments that suggested that Fed rate cuts might come sooner than expected. Stock and bond markets took this as a good sign. They were already in a Santa Claus rally and broke out to new highs for the year. The interest rate on
Not many people know that Oregon decriminalized all drugs through a ballot initiative. The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article: “Oregon Decriminalized Hard Drugs: It Is Not Working.” The question here is, why not? In 2020, the State of Oregon decriminalized all drugs, including hard drugs such as heroin, crystal meth, which you will
Greenwashing is a relatively new term to describe false and misleading claims that a product or business practice has environmental benefits. The point is that companies can advertise their efforts as “green” while continuing various profitable activities that environmentalists consider “harmful,” gaming the system and profiting off
[ Adapted from a classroom lecture delivered November 14, 2018 .] Scholars and scientists tell us that humanity is two or three hundred thousand years old, depending on how you define it. If you draw a graph with a horizontal line across a twenty-five-foot long wall to represent 250,000 years, then every foot would represent 10,000 years of human
Gallop has just released its report on Prosperity and Well Being in the 50 States. North Dakota jumped 18 places to take the number one spot, thanks to the oil discoveries there. What stuck me was the relationship between high well being and medical marijuana laws. There are about 20 states that have passed medical marijuana laws, permitting the
by Ron Paul Last week Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel proposed an additional 40,000 reduction in active duty US Army personnel, down to 450,000 soldiers. As US troops are being withdrawn from the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it might make sense to reduce not only the active duty military but the entire military budget. However, from the
Here is a forecast of Gross Domestic Product based on the Austrian notion of the money supply and its growth rate. Jeffrey Peshut shows that Real GDP peaks with a variable lag to the growth rate of the True Money Supply. In other words we should expect Real GDP growth to peak from 1 to 3 years after the True Money Supply growth rate peaks. He
A recent study by Gan Li found that 90% of households in China own their homes and that housing is typically the largest item in household wealth. The study reinforces the idea that China has been experiencing a real estate bubble of epic proportions the popping of which the Communist Party cannot tolerate. “The Chinese housing market is clearly
I was recently interviewed by Thomas Ressler for the industry publication Inside MBS @ ABS on the recent change in the Fed’s tapering of its Quantitative Easy program: Economist Mark Thornton, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, an economic think tank in Auburn, AL, said he was “a little bit surprised that the Fed upped the ante on
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.