Booms and Busts

One lesson learned should be that fiat paper money won’t work.

While the Fed tries to engineer the mythical “soft landing” for the economy, Austrian economists know that this is an exercise in futility. Once the credit-fueled boom occurs, the bust logically follows.

Recorded at the Mises Circle in Fort Myers, Florida, 4 November 2023.

Recorded at the Mises Circle in Fort Myers, Florida, 4 November 2023.

The US economy has deteriorated into little more than a series of asset bubbles driven by the inflationary policies of the central bank.

Recorded at the Mises Circle in Fort Myers, Florida, 4 November 2023.

As the federal government continues its Ponzi scheme of issuing debt to pay for past debts, interest rates will increase to the point where this no longer is a tenable strategy—if it ever was.

Forget the New York Times and other publications that cheerlead for the current regime. Austrian economics spells out the consequences for reckless monetary policies, and those consequences are unavoidable.

The boom-and-bust cycles are not natural to a market economy, contra Keynes. Instead, government through monetary manipulation creates them—and then politicians blame markets themselves.

Popular economic thinking holds that consumer spending is the most important driver of the economy. Actually, demand can’t exist without something first being supplied.