Analogies involving cars and firepower are not appropriate for monetary policy. They propagate the idea that the Fed can carefully "steer" the economy or that they have some large, heterogeneous set of policy tools, when the Fed can really only do one thing: artificial credit expansion.
Are modern economists pseudoscientists like the astrologers of old?
This weekend, over 130 scholars from over 10 countries and 58 colleges and universities gathered in Auburn for the 2016 Austrian Economics Research Conference.
Thanks to the great Tatsuya Iwakura, who has translated numerous books by Austrian economists into Japanese, The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays, edited by Richard Ebeling, is now available as a Kindle book in Japanese.
Robert Mulligan, longtime Associated Scholar of the Mises Institute will join Indiana University East this summer as the new Dean of the School of Business and Economics.
The negative interest rates imposed by the Bank of Japan have begun to make their way into the Japanese banking system. Japanese trust banks have begun to impose negative interest rates on accounts held by institutional investors.
On the eve of World War II, Keynes delivered a chilling address on the BBC, talking about the "great experiment" of curing unemployment through war expenditure.
As with East Germany, a liberalized Cuba would still require decades to catch up to its affluent neighbors, economically. North Korea is an even more extreme case. All these cases illustrate that political changes cannot substitute for the hard work of building wealth.
Speculation is swirling as to what the Federal Reserve might do next. None of the likely next steps are terribly promising.
Years after his death, more students and scholars than ever are reading and building on the work of Murray Rothbard. Meanwhile, the Conservative movement that so often attacked him is quickly vanishing.
