Mark is not fooling around today. He looks back at the history of gold and its price, which some believe is too erratic and too unstable (like Bitcoin) to serve as a basis of a monetary system. Mark shows that it is not gold that destabilizes events in the real world, but rather real world events related to political decision-making that has made the price of gold unstable. The price of gold is a "minor" indicator of what governments are really up to. Be...
Read More »With the Trump Indictment, America Is a Step Closer to Being a Banana Republic
When Rudy Giuliani was pursuing his infamous Wall Street prosecutions in the 1980s, his aides admitted that they were indicting people on “novel legal theories” that had not been used before. A Giuliani lieutenant bragged to a group of law students that prosecutors in his office ...were guilty of criminalizing technical offenses. . .. Many of the prosecution theories we used were novel. Many of the statutes that we charged under . . . hadn’t been charged as crimes...
Read More »Can Civilization Survive without Sound Money?
As long as states are around, money will never be sound. But first, some clarity. Sound money, per Ludwig von Mises, has two aspects: It serves as a commonly accepted medium of exchange, while also making it difficult for governments to meddle with it. We can see immediately that sound money is nowhere to be found in today’s world. All the current rhetoric about banks and their systemic risks are about money that’s subject to political expediency, the kind that...
Read More »De-Dollarization and the Fall of American Hegemony
On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop discuss the global moves being made against the US dollar. The regime's decade long weaponization of money and banking has both international rivals and historical allies looking for alternatives. Ryan and Tho discuss what that means for Americans, and what may come next. [embedded content] Recommended Reading "World needs to end risky reliance on U.S. dollar: BoE's Carney" (Reuters, 2019):...
Read More »Central Banks Are Creating the Return of Mugabenomics
Because his actions were so outrageous, perhaps it is impossible to satirize the former president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, but perhaps I can describe him. As a shout-out to all my neighbors in the Asia Pacific, let us not forget the Sun Tzu tradition to “know the enemy.” For an analysis of the Zimbabwe hyperinflation, see Jayson Coomer and Thomas Gstraunthaler’s article in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. Below, I draw similarities between Mugabe’s...
Read More »How Politicians Use Regulations to Deflect Blame
Thanks to their adoring media, politicians create crises and then blame businesses for them. And the political "solutions" are worse than the original problems. Original Article: "How Politicians Use Regulations to Deflect Blame" This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. [embedded content]...
Read More »Wisdom from a Yenta
Left Is Not Wokeby Susan NeimanPolity Press, 2023; 155 pp. There is much to dislike in this book. Susan Neiman, a former philosophy professor who now heads the “Einstein Discussion Group” in Potsdam, is a socialist who has good things to say about Communist East Germany and parrots every anticapitalist cliché in the book. I have blasted some of her work in earlier reviews. In Left Is Not Woke, though, she makes some good points, and I’m going to concentrate on them...
Read More »With the Feds, It’s the Fox Guarding the Henhouse
Bob is joined by guest Peter St. Onge to discuss how SVB's CEO, as well as Bernie Madoff, had key positions advising the Fed and SEC. Then they discuss how we should think about central banks losing money. How the SEC was Charmed by Madoff: Mises.org/HAP389a Bob's Understanding Money Mechanics: Mises.org/HAP389b [embedded content] [embedded content]...
Read More »The Outbreak of World War I: A Libertarian Realist Rebuttal
One excuse that political elites give when they drag nations into war is that the conflict was "inevitable" or "unavoidable." Ralph Raico knew better. Original Article: "The Outbreak of World War I: A Libertarian Realist Rebuttal" This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. [embedded content]...
Read More »Credit Suisse Collapsed Because of Government Intervention, Not Despite It
Credit Suisse, one of the fifty largest banks in the world, has joined the long list of Western banks over the past two decades that have been rescued from the brink of failure and subsequently acquired by a larger financial institution. After comments from the chairman of the Saudi National Bank triggered the evaporation of almost a third of the megabank’s market capitalization, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) announced the creation of a new facility to preemptively...
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