The crash of the Argentine peso last month brings to a close yet another foredoomed experiment in South American left-wing populism. The precipitous “devaluation” of the peso by 15 percent against the U.S. dollar in January represents its steepest decline since the devaluation of 2001 when Argentina defaulted on its foreign debt. From January 21
[Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from Joseph Salerno’s foreword to the new third edition of Brendan Brown’s book Euro Crash: How Asset Price Inflation Destroys the Wealth of Nations .] Brendan Brown is a rara avis — a practicing financial economist and shrewd observer of financial markets, players, and policies, whose prolific writings are
According to mainstream economics textbooks, one of the primary functions of money is to measure the value of goods and services exchanged on the market. A typical statement of this view is given by Frederic Mishkin in his textbook on money and banking. “[M]oney ... is used to measure value in the economy,” he claims. “We measure the value of
This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily One of the worst effects of modern Keynesian economics is that its total spending (“aggregate demand”) approach to output and employment provides a pseudo-scientific justification for the central error of mercantilism — an error that dates back to the sixteenth century. According to this
There are strong indications that the remarkable run up of asset prices in the last few years is beginning to run out of steam and may be on the verge of collapse. We will leave aside the question of whether the asset inflation is symptomatic of a garden-variety inflationary boom or is a more virulent bubble phenomenon in which prices are rising
Adapted from “ Imperialism and the Logic of War Making .” All governments past and present, regardless of their formal organization, involve the rule of the many by the few. In other words, all governments are fundamentally oligarchic. The reasons are twofold. First, governments are nonproductive organizations and can only subsist by extracting
Recently, the Financial Times published an article containing charts displaying the correlation between government spending and real GDP growth. Based on these correlations, the author of the article, Matthew Klein, comments: “It’s no secret that spending cuts (and tax hikes) have retarded America’s growth for the past four years.” He goes on to
A Good Talk for the Classroom by Mark Thornton Murray Rothbard argued that the cause of the Great Depression was the result of Herbert Hoover’s New Deal policies which sought to keep wages and profits high. Robert Higgs, Richard Vedder, and Lowell Gallaway extended this thesis to include FDR’s New Deal policies which created artificially high
[From The Daily Bell, July 3, 2011] Daily Bell: You’ve just published a new book. Can you tell us about it? Dr. Joseph Salerno: I would be happy to. The book is entitled Money: Sound and Unsound and was published in 2010 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. It is a collection of essays on monetary topics that I have written over the past 25 years.
The 26 essays collected in this book were published over the last three decades in a variety of academic journals, scholarly books, policy-report series, and periodicals aimed at the nonspecialist. Several were originally published in electronic periodicals. They share a common theme despite the fact that they were written at different times and
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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.