This month, we will host the Austrian Economics Research Conference (AERC), one of our most important programs. We’ll have thirty-one students attending, and nineteen students will deliver papers of their own. How encouraging!Dr. Joseph Salerno, our Academic Vice President, says: “The students who present papers at AERC are of the highest quality. They are attracted by a scholarly competition offering generous monetary awards in which paper...
Read More »A Circus of Errors
When Nvidia reported high fourth quarter earnings for 2023 in February 2024, it sparked a general rally in stock markets. Stock markets in the United States, Japan, and Europe jumped to all-time highs after a few days of slight declines.It seems strange for one company’s earnings call to have such a widespread effect, but many are saying that this is all a part of a technological revolution, in which real productivity will increase dramatically due to artificial...
Read More »Central Banks and Housing Finance
Although manipulating housing finance is not among the Federal Reserve’s statutory objectives, the U.S. central bank has long been an essential factor in the behavior of mortgage markets, for better or worse, often for worse. In 1969, for example, the Fed created a severe credit crunch in housing finance by its interest rate policy. Its higher interest rates, combined with the then-ceiling on deposit interest rates, cut off the flow of deposits to savings and loans,...
Read More »The American Economy: A House of Cards
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Read More »The Politician BehindTrump v. Anderson Still Doesn’t Understand Why She Lost
The US Supreme Court released its ruling on Trump v. Anderson this week and unanimously slapped down the Colorado Supreme Court which had tried to disqualify candidate Donald Trump from the Colorado ballot using section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US constitution.The US Supreme Court's ruling was so baseless in law that even the most Left and partisan members of SCOTUS joined the majority in declaring the Colorado ruling null and void. The case had been...
Read More »Juvenal’s Greatest Poser: “Who Will Guard the Federal Reserve?”
[This article was first published in the New York Sun.]“Who will guard these guardians?” That poser of Juvenal, satirist of Rome, is an immortal question — nowhere more pertinent, though, than in deciding who should oversee the Federal Reserve. In the Fed, we have supposed guardians of stable prices who have decided by themselves to create perpetual inflation.Just to mark the point: Guardians of the currency have decided by themselves to depreciate it forever....
Read More »Smedley Butler Explains the Latest Excuse for American Intervention in Ukraine
Senior Fellow Alex Pollock drew my attention to an important quotation by Smedley Butler: 1935 speech and later a book by Major General Smedley D. Butler (USMC), includes “… A racket is best described, I believe, something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make large fortunes. … If we put...
Read More »Apartment Bridge Loans Are Collapsing
Stoked by ultra-loose monetary policy from the Federal Reserve, capital markets have been in a persistent bubble for several years. Printing trillions of new dollars and maintaining a zero-interest rate policy (“ZIRP”) was marketed by politicians and bureaucrats as supportive of the “main street economy,” but those trillions were directed primarily towards speculation in capital markets. Nowhere was this malinvestment more apparent than in apartment investing. After...
Read More »Be on the Lookout for These Lies in Biden’s State of the Union Address
On Thursday evening, President Joe Biden is set to give his third State of the Union address. The political press has been buzzing with speculation over what the president will say. That speculation, however, is focused more on how Biden will perform, and which issues he will prioritize. Much of the speech is expected to be familiar.The story Biden will tell about what he has done as president and where the country finds itself as a result will be the same dishonest...
Read More »Dissecting Lincoln
Thomas DiLorenzo, the president of the Mises Institute, has already reviewed Paul C. Graham’s Nonsense on Stilts: The Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Imaginary Nation (Shotwell Publishing, 2024) in characteristically excellent fashion, but the book is so insightful that some further comments are warranted. It is clear that Graham has a philosophical turn of mind and is a master of linguistic analysis.His skill is amply on display in his dissection of Abraham...
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