The thirty-eighth annual Mises University, where I have lectured for more than thirty of those years, will be held from July 28th to August 3rd at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. Year after year, student attendees from all over the world tell us that it was the best week of their school year; that they learned more about the economic world in that week than in four years of college; that they would love to come back next summer; and that they will urge their...
Read More »Mises in Argentina: Lessons of the Past for Today
Ludwig von Mises visited Argentina in June 1959 by invitation of Dr. Alberto Benegas Lynch. The lectures Mises delivered at the University of Buenos Aires are reproduced in the book Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow. As the title suggests, the economic knowledge transmitted by Mises was for both those days and for the future. Argentina in 1959 was in a recession, the Frondizi administration trying to cope with the terrible situation left by President...
Read More »Campus Kids Could Deliver Gaza
American foreign policy is a museum of horrors in which Gaza 2023/2024 is the main exhibit.It is my conviction that Gaza is much more than just one more American foreign-policy failure, an event and topic to swill around like mouth wash, spit out and move on, once the usual “tsk, tsk” bromides have been disgorged.Uncle Sam’s usual deathly mixture of ignorance, cruelty and superiority has been exceeded with respect to Gaza. It is my belief that the United States’...
Read More »Religion and science: Pope John Paul II visits CERN
The former director general of CERN, Herwig Schopper, speaks with Pope John Paul II about the differences between religion and science. #switzerland #pope #religion #science #cern --- swissinfo.ch is the international branch of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC). Its role is to report on Switzerland and to provide a Swiss perspective on international events. For more articles, interviews and videos visit swissinfo.ch or subscribe to our YouTube channel: Website:...
Read More »Freedom of Contract and Property Rights
The classical liberal defense of contractual freedom is derived from the principle of individual autonomy. Freedom of contract entails the right to enter into or exit from contracts at will. As Richard Epstein argues in his defense of the contract at will:The first way to argue for the contract at will is to insist upon the importance of freedom of contract as an end in itself. Freedom of contract is an aspect of individual liberty, every bit as much as freedom of...
Read More »Central Banks Are Wrong about Rate Cuts
When we talk about monetary policy, people do not understand the importance of interest rates reflecting the reality of inflation and risk. Interest rates are the price of risk and manipulating them down leads to bubbles that end in financial crises, while imposing too high rates can penalize the economy. Ideally, interest rates would flow freely and there would be no central bank to fix them.A price signal as important as interest rates or the amount of money would...
Read More »Jehisson Santacruz playing the Colombian kuisi
Jehisson Santacruz is a Colombian artist who's been living in exile in Switzerland since 2019. He fled his home country more than once because of death threats. As part of the Colombian diaspora, he was able to take part in the search for testimonies launched by the Truth Commission, that's working to rebuild the national identity, giving a voice to the civil war's victims. He's very passionate about the arts and traditions of Colombia and played the Colombian gaita, or kuisi, at the end of...
Read More »Week Ahead: FOMC, US Jobs, EMU Inflation, JPY Pressure
The backing up of US rates did not lift the dollar broadly as it appeared to have done previously. The dollar-bloc currencies, led by the Australian dollar, and sterling advanced last week, while the Swiss franc and Japanese yen were unable to find traction. The Bank of Japan had an opportunity to have protested the yen's weakness more adamantly but did not do so. Recognizing the role of interest rate differentials as an important driver, the Ministry of Finance...
Read More »Economic Education Has Become Economic Disinformation
Modern economics is in terrible shape. But economics education appears to be worse still. This becomes clear when discussing basic economics with those who have taken courses in the field. Rather than doing away with economic misunderstandings and outright nonsense, economics education apparently provides students with a pseudoscientific rationale for their illusions.Two such ideas are annoyingly common. One is the view that markets can only work under perfect...
Read More »The Great Chocolate Crisis
What is the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order....
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SNB & CHF
