As I’ve been saying , the Japanese economy is shaping up, with evidence given in this report : The [Japanese] government is no longer handing blank cheques to construction companies; in fact, it has been cutting public spending for the last two years. Japan’s growth, this time round, is led by the private sector. Kakutaro Kitashiro, chairman of
A correspondent asks: “I can see that the government might devalue a currency backed by gold by simply decreasing the amount of gold it will pay out in exchange for the banknotes, but how would it devalue a fiat currency? Also, what is meant by the fact that the dollar is the world’s premier reserve currency? What is a reserve currency? Why do
A friend took me to hear a lecture given by Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen on ‘Democracy and Globalization’ — which contained little enough about ‘globalization’ — and whose insights on democracy were of the order that idea that we were ‘racist’ to think Europeans were largely responsible, en masse, for spreading the worship of that great
Yi Gang, director of the Monetary Policy Department of the People’s Bank of China, admitted that the quick growth in credit was despite the central bank’s precautionary measures. He cautioned that excess lending, if not effectively checked, may lead to serious problems to undermine the entire Chinese economy development: A fast rise in money
Rebar Shortage Puts a Crimp on Building (LATimes): “Rebar is just a lowly scrap metal, but it’s starting to look like gold on some construction sites. The steel reinforcing rods used in building everything from skyscrapers to freeway sound walls are in short supply on the West Coast. That has led to sporadic delays at building projects around
Recently, there has been some talk in the market about the paper by Fed Board researcher Orphanides on ‘Monetary policy in deflation’ , though many have considered it as being overtaken by events such as the past 6-months’ stronger GDP numbers. This dismissal may well prove to be premature. The work is--crucially--concerned primarily with the
In a recent TV debate I enjoyed with a prominent member of the East Coast Internationalist establishment, the usual complacency about the continuation of low inflation (read: published indices of price rises) was combined by my opponent with high words of praise for Alan Greenspan’s sound leadership and a panegyric to the US productivity
Writes Carroll Cox , editor of the Pioneer newspaper in Snowflake, Arizona: “In my county of Apache, Arizona, 2/3 of employed people with full time jobs work for some level of government and education. In the neighboring county of Navajo, close to half of people are employed by government. With the help of Phoenix consultants Elliot Pollock and
The Globalization Fairy will ‘intellectualize’ inflation away.... and you can simply THINK your stomach full, without having to buy any of that increasingly expensive wheat with which to make your bread--as implied in the Q&A after Greenspan’s testimony yesterday . TOOMEY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And, Chairman Greenspan, thank you for your
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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.