SNB & CHF

“Why do we borrow our own currency in the first place?”Stephanie Kelton posed this question in her new documentary, Finding the Money, and a clip of Jared Berstein’s fumbled response to the question has gone viral on social media. Bernstein is the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers to Biden, and so we would expect that he would have an articulate answer to Kelton’s question, but he did not.Instead of trying to parse his response or explain why he fumbled, I...

According to a new report from the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics this week, the US economy added 175,000 jobs for the month of April while the unemployment rate rose slightly to 3.9%. The new reported job growth was considered a “miss” in that it came in below expectations, and for the first time in months, the media did not declare the jobs report to be “a blowout” or “strong.” Instead, the official narrative seemed to be that the “slowing economy”...

On the 27th of March, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed an executive order which had the purpose of curbing speech deemed as “anti-semitic” on all state-run universities. Unfortunately, speech protection on public universities has been shaky in the past with universities attempting to restrict speech many times with varying levels of success. Supreme Court decision Healey v James 1972 states that “Among the rights protected by the First Amendment is the right of...

Earlier this year, I gave a short course on Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics for scientists and engineers at my institute. The course was brief, and I focused only on ideas that were relevant for researchers in engineering and the natural sciences. One of the ideas we talked about was supply and demand, in order to link it to the supply and demand of research-related things: the labor of researchers, research articles on specific topics, and so on.What I told...

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....

Hold up your hand if you think that the aggregate losses of an organization are an asset of that organization. No hands at all? Absolutely right. Losses are not an asset. That’s accounting 101. Yet the greatest central bank in the world, the Federal Reserve, insists on claiming that its continuing losses, which have accumulated to the staggering sum of $164 billion, are an accounting asset.The Fed seeks to palm off this accounting entry as a “Deferred Asset.” Why...

In our modern political culture, many people claim that profits are the outcome of some individuals exploiting other individuals. Hence, anyone who is seen trying to make profits is regarded as an enemy of society and must be stopped before inflicting damage. According to Henry Hazlitt, “The indignation shown by many people today at the mention of the very word profits indicates how little understanding there is of the vital function that profits play in our...

The Link between Economic Calculation and Human PersonalityEconomists and historians have clearly shown that the destruction of the value and function of money by hyperinflation makes economic calculation impossible and leads to economic and social disintegration and widespread poverty. What is not so clearly understood, even by many economists, is that during periods of rapid inflation, the inability to economically calculate undermines the very nature of property...

How Nations Escape Poverty: Vietnam, Poland, and the Origins of Prosperityby Rainer ZitelmannEncounter Books, 2024; xiii + 212 pp.Rainer Zitelmann has a well-deserved reputation as a defender of the free market; few, if any, can match his immense capacity for amassing relevant facts and using them effectively to support his arguments. This capacity is much in evidence in his latest book, How Nations Escape Poverty. They do so, Zitelmann says, by moving from socialism...

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....