Mises Search

Long ago, in a universe of sane fiscal policy far away, there existed an institution, then new to the world of international banking and finance, called the Federal Reserve Bank, whose primary concern of the day—the day being its founding on December 13, 1913—was to have very large reserves of cash backed by even larger reserves of gold that were

Many investors still view gold as a safe-haven investment, but there remains much confusion regarding the extent to which the gold market is vulnerable to manipulation through short-term rigged market trades, and long-arm central bank interventions. First, it remains unclear whether or not much of the gold that is being sold as shares and in

When Alexis de Tocqueville set forth his observations on American democracy, he began his story with a description of township government. “It is man,” he said “who makes monarchies and establishes republics, but the township seems to come directly from the hand of God.” The oft-revered, sometimes maligned Frenchman’s instincts were sound on this

There is a peculiar intellectual and emotional revulsion that comes with reading about Italy’s endless cycle of economic and political woes — whether having to do with the near-collapse of the world’s oldest bank or the effective nation-wide paralysis of Italian industry. Despite this near-permanent state of affairs, the country’s overwhelming

The well-known thesis of Max Weber regarding the intimate relationship between Calvinism and Capitalism has long been challenged by Western scholars yet has always found its proponents. The French historian of ideas and philosopher Henri Sée wrote in The Origins of Modern Capitalism (1926) that “the Reformation, particularly in the form of

Time is the soul of money, the long-view — its immortality. Hard assets are forever, even when destroyed by the cataclysms of history. It is the outlook that perpetuated the most competent and powerful aristocracies in continental Europe, well up through World War I and, in certain prominent cases, beyond; it is the mindset that has sustained the

The epic sale in mid-November of the painting Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci at the auction price of more than $450 million to a Middle Eastern buyer contained within its occasion three key lessons about the difference between market value and the market for Value — a distinction that perhaps best defines the long-term difference between

The most prominent feature of the geopolitics of Russia and the West pivots upon a relatively obscure feature of the geopolitics of Russia and China. The mainstream media in the U.S. has covered minimally and only rather incidentally the estimated $900 billion construction of a complex matrix of strategic transport routes known generally as the

Aston Martin, “the noble company that’s been at death’s door more times in its long history than most”, in the words of one elegant British sporting journal, is going through one of the very best periods of its storied 105-year history, with a public offering being organized to crown a profitable run that has saved the day—yet again. In 2016, the

Beautiful Augsburg, city of bronzed doors and glory of the German Renaissance, occupies an unusual and mostly unknown position in the history of capitalism as the ‘birthplace of the modern’ in both in free-market theories and self-made magnates. The gable-roofed imperial city did not seem, at first, destined for such: up through the middle of the