Booms and Busts

Black swans don’t cause crashes: they reveal them. Mark Thornton shows how easy money breeds “sequestered capital” in opaque assets, priming the next bust.

Why do independent central banks exist in the modern economy? It was originally thought independent central banks would prevent government extravagance from creating inflation.

Red + green = brown. Mark Thornton shows how towering debt and easy money set the stage for hyperinflation.

In an attempt to explain business cycles, Milton Friedman came up with a plucked-string analogy. Like all Monetarist theories, however, this also had fatal flaws.

Few presidents—if any—in our lifetimes have done as much damage as George W. Bush did in his eight years in office. Unfortunately, a number of pundits are trying to rehabilitate his disaster of a presidency to contrast him to President Trump.

Greg Kaza reviews Ben Bernanke's 21st Century Monetary Policy: The Federal Reserve from the Great Inflation to COVID-19. The book is a candid yet self-justifying defense of the Federal Reserve's monetary policy that refuses to acknowledge how stimulus has driven inflation.

Keynesian economists claim government budget surpluses are national savings, but real savings drive capital development. A surplus just means more revenue to the government, not the private economy.

Keynesian orthodoxy claims that cuts in government spending mean less “aggregate demand,” and less “aggregate demand” leads to recessions. Economic experience, however, shows us this is a false theory, something Austrian economists have known for a long time.

The Efficient Market Hypothesis claims that financial markets process information immediately and correctly. However, since the EMH is based upon unrealistic assumptions, we also have to question the efficacy of this hypothesis, especially when central banks intervene in the markets.

The Efficient Market Hypothesis claims that financial markets process information immediately and correctly. However, since the EMH is based upon unrealistic assumptions, we also have to question the efficacy of this hypothesis, especially when central banks intervene in the markets.