Donald Trump has not had an easy, straight-forward relation with the Federal Reserve. He has both claimed to be a low-interest rate person and accused the Fed of keeping interest rates too low for political reasons. He has also expressed regret at appointing Jerome Powell and the White House has even explored the possibility of firing or demoting
There is a changing of the guard at the European Central Bank this year with two important new appointments. Philip Lane, the governor of the Irish central bank, was appointed chief economist of the ECB back in June. And and the current head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, was recently nominated to succeed Mario Draghi as president of the ECB in
Joakim Book has recently published an essay at AIER arguing that Rothbard was wrong to change his mind about free banking in Scotland. Rothbard had originally praised the episode of Scottish free banking in his 1983 book The Mystery of Banking , but then changed his mind in a 1988 essay on The Myth of Free Banking in Scotland . While the topic has
Monetary affairs have always been subject to government intervention of one kind or another. In ancient times, these interventions were made to raise funds for public spending; by debasing the coinage, kings and other rulers could raise taxes without having to abide by constitutional rules and without raising popular anger at their spending.
There is a growing genre of literature that can best be described as apologias for Ebenezer , the aim of which is to show that Ebenezer Scrooge, the main character of Dickens’s classic Christmas tale, was really a great man, unfairly put upon by spectral busybodies and hand-wringing underlings . A peaceful and honest man, Scrooge was really the
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. In the spring and summer of 1920 a curious phenomenon appeared in Austria. While Viennese bureaucrats were dealing with the consequences of the Saint-Germain peace treaty and Hans Kelsen was drawing up a constitution for the new republic, across Austria every small town and municipality,
The recent blowup of GameStop shares has revealed, if anyone was still doubting, that the center of clown world is not Washington, DC, nor Silicon Valley—but Wall Street. To be clear, this is not meant to refer to the gallant band of redditors from r/wallstreetbets—those few, those happy few, that band of brothers who, as of this writing, may very
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. One of the first things that the student of economics is liable to be tortured with when he turns to monetary theory is the equation of exchange. Based on a mechanistic understanding of the quantity theory of money, the equation purports to show the relation between the supply of money
The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking Saifedean Ammous Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2018 xviii + 286 pp. Abstract: Treating bitcoin from the point of view of Austrian economics, Saifedean Ammous’ The Bitcoin Standard relates bitcoin to the theory of the market economy as a whole. Bitcoin is not necessarily
Introduction There has been a lot of talk about central bank digital currency (CBDC) recently, as central bankers around the world are discussing the possibility of launching their own CBDCs. Some of the problems of CBDCs have been pointed out already (see, e.g., here and here ), and I will not discuss them too much here. The purpose of the
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.
