Booms and Busts

Recorded at the 2003 Supporters Summit: Prosperty, War, and Depression.

(24:29)

Recorded at the 2003 Supporters Summit: Prosperty, War, and Depression.

(25:00)

Recorded at the 2003 Supporters Summit: Prosperty, War, and Depression.

(38:26)

Recorded at Mises University 2003.

Jorg Guido Hülsmann addresses some of the Problems in Cycle Theory at the 2003 Austrian Scholars Conference.

Boom, Bust, and the Future (23:29) January 18-19, 2002

One of the most difficult things to understand about banking is how money is created out of thin air.  Current commercial bank liabilities are immediate. The banks do not have the reserves to redeem all demand notes. Thus, banks are inherently insolvent. But, government has eliminated runs on banks. Banks are not allowed to fail when they are mismanaged.

Recorded at Mises University 2001.

Like the children of Lake Wobegon, writes Robert Blumen, many investors in the 1990s believed that stock market returns would always be above average. They were proven wrong. But Greenspan and many others advance a slightly different justification for the bubble: the efficient markets hypothesis, which argues that the current price, whatever it is and even when pump up by credit expansion, is the best of all possible worlds.

The answer is no, says Joseph Salerno. The Fed's performance has been astoundingly bad throughout Greenspan's tenure as Chairman. Perhaps worse, Greenspan has been a relentless purveyor of economic fallacies designed to obscure and justify this egregious performance. However, his departure from the stage might not be cause for unalloyed joy among proponents of sound money—Ben Bernanke could be lurking in the wings.