As Bob Murphy and I discussed on the Human Action Podcast, economists and financial news media are already declaring macroeconomic victory by claiming that the Federal Reserve has achieved a “soft landing,” meaning that they have raised interest rates just enough to quell price inflation without causing a crisis or recession. Even Fed Chair Jerome
Paul Krugman, in an article titled “ None Dare Call It Victory ,” calls on the Fed to change its inflation target from two to three percent, which would mean that the Fed could go ahead and reverse course on tightening, since at least one official price inflation measure has reached 2.9 percent. He gives some reasons for three percent (or, as he
Abstract: Austrian economists have debated issues of monetary theory and inflation extensively, but there is still no agreement on the definition of inflation. Mises (1953, 240) defined inflation as an increase in the supply of money not offset by an increase in the demand for money, leading to a fall in the purchasing power of money (PPM).
The Economist, a disappointing magazine, has a fittingly disappointing list of “What to read to understand how economists think.” It’s one of their “evergreen” articles that they repost from time to time. It includes Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom , Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers , Dubner and Levitt’s Freakonomics , and two lesser-known
The Federal Trade Commission has filed a lawsuit against Amazon, claiming that it wields monopoly power in online retail. According to the FTC, Amazon “is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power.” Here are some of the strategies included in the official complaint :
Bank stocks are still floundering after they took a major hit in March of this year, coinciding with the failures of Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic Bank, and Signature Bank. KRE, a regional banking ETF, is down 27 percent year-to-date, while KBE, an ETF with large banks, is down 16 percent year-to-date. Quarterly earnings will be reported by
Good News Paul Krugman has declared a “better-than-Goldilocks soft landing” due to (his favored) measures of price inflation reaching two percent and real GDP growing at 3.3 percent. Bad News Credit card delinquency has doubled since 2021. Regional bank stocks fell over 10% after Powell’s FOMC press conference. The civilian labor force has fallen
Many are questioning the Federal Reserve’s political independence lately. A reporter asked about it at the end of Chair Powell’s FOMC press conference , and it also came up in Powell’s 60 Minutes interview : PELLEY: Your decisions inevitably are going to have a bearing on this year’s election. And I wonder, to what degree does politics determine
Stock markets tumbled this morning when the January Consumer Price Index (CPI) data came in hotter than expected. If you are wondering what the connection could be, the answer is that higher-than-expected price inflation means a longer-than-expected wait for the Fed to cut its interest rate target. It’s clear that financial markets are addicted to
Five days before the last Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, Tho Bishop wrote about how the Fed and other agencies are preparing for a crisis without telling everyone they are preparing for a crisis. In his article, he showed how the Fed and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency were working on a policy that would require banks
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.