Booms and Busts

Presented at Mises University 2019.

Inflation can always give only a temporary fillip to the economy, and will leave us with a legacy of postponed adjustments and new maladjustments which make our problem more difficult.

The “boom-bust” cycle is generated by monetary intervention in the market, specifically bank credit expansion to business. 

The world now has the impossible choice of permanently reduced productivity and slower economic growth — or the mass bankruptcy of a significant percentage of the economy.

In much of America, the New Deal was run by a small number of very powerful political bosses.

Vikram Mansharamani’s second edition of Boombustology: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before They Burst has all the great insights from the first edition plus a foreword by James Grant.

It is the lethal combination of tariffs and the end of the expansionary phase of the credit cycle which should concern us.

Unlike Greece, Italy or other seriously debt-laden economies, it’s not just government borrowing that’s the main risk to Turkey.

The most characteristic feature of post-WWII business cycles is that they have originated in deliberately inflationary policies directed by central banks. 

Using Japan as a model, governments are steering us toward a worldwide zombie economy — but we're likely to end up with something that looks more like Argentina than Japan.