Mises Wire

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just launched the Program on Monetary Policy under the direction of Scott Sumner.

Nicolas Cachanosky has recently released a very timely and well thought out working paper, which should be of interest to all those serious about limiting the harm central control of money unleashes on economic activity.

Mr. Selgin was one of the first Mises Institute Fellows in the early 1980s. He recently posted an essay detailing his history with the modern school of Austrian economics.

One by-product of the Paris terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo was an outpouring of support for freedom of speech.

EcPoFi recaps last year's development of the True Money Supply (TMS), a monetary aggregate developed by Murray Rothbard and myself in the 1980s.

While insisting on prison and fines for peaceful Americans who only wish to engage in free trade, supporters of embargoes like the Cuban embargo have never made a convincing case for why taxpayers, merchants, and consumers should be forced to forego their property rights and bear the costs of the embargo’s war on free trade.

Just in case you have any thoughts that people at the Fed might have become slightly less dovish on inflation, rest assured, they have not. 

As of this week, when Eurozone price inflation reached negative levels, ECB's Mario Draghi decided to throw caution to the wind and brace “for further measures, which could, if needed, be implemented in a timely manner”. Estimates for the European QE program are around €500 billion, but the overall size and timescale will most likely remain open-ended.

Last year, British entrepreneur Mike Watts made headlines when he opened England’s first private toll road in more than a hundred years. The road has now been closed, but its brief history provides a sad (and all-too-typical) example of how government sabotages entrepreneurs and hurts their customers.