Booms and Busts

How do recurrent cycles of boom and recession compare to isolated crises caused by extraordinary phenomena? 

In Las Vegas, airline passengers plummeted 64 percent during 2020, and the convention business has collapsed. For Vegas, there are troubling signs that the world is not in a hurry to spend freely on extravagant face-to-face meetings. 

To foster economic recovery, we do not need "stability." What we need is an environment of freely changing prices, even if price changes are frequent and substantial. Only this call allow markets to respond to consumer needs. 

For decades, demand-side policies showed diminishing but not lethal results, but now the world has repeated the same policies so many times that there is simply exhaustion.

The answer lies in audacious economic reforms that favor markets and entrepreneurs: liquidate bad investments, let deflation happen, cut government spending, cut taxes, let wages fall.

The answer lies in audacious economic reforms that favor markets and entrepreneurs: liquidate bad investments, let deflation happen, cut government spending, cut taxes, let wages fall.

Could new gold discoveries cause a (small) boom-bust cycle if the gold hit the loan market before other sectors? Bill Barnett and Walter Block join Bob Murphy to discuss. 

By 1715, the manipulation of the currency, the increase in public debt, and the mismanagement of state finances had left France in poverty and chaos. Such was the state of affairs when John Law appeared in Paris.

An unheralded work on the Austrian business cycle that rivals the work of the greats is Jesús Huerta de Soto’s Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles, which outlines a multistate process of boom and bust. 

An unheralded work on the Austrian business cycle that rivals the work of the greats is Jesús Huerta de Soto’s Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles, which outlines a multistate process of boom and bust.