Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

While many market participants are concerned about rate increases, they appear to be ignoring the largest risk: the potential for a massive liquidity drain in 2023. Even though December is here, central banks’ balance sheets have hardly, if at all, decreased. Rather than real sales, a weaker currency and the price of the accumulated bonds account for the majority of the fall in the balance sheets of the major central banks. In the context of governments deficits that...

Austerity works. We know what it is and don’t like it, but it works. It usually means cutting your consumption and spending, paying down your debts, pawning assets, and working more hours to restore your economic situation. You might invoke “austerity” because you lost your job, your house burned down, or you have an unexpected child on the way. You might take similar actions if the economy was in crisis. It’s essentially the same thing as cutting expenses to save...

The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on Wednesday announced it will raise the target federal funds rate by 50 basis points, bringing the target rate to 4.5 percent. Wednesday’s rate hike followed four hikes in a row of 75 basis points, and is the smallest rate hike since March. According to the FOMC’s press release, the committee voted unanimously for the half point hike, pointing out that “[price] inflation remains elevated” while also...

The evidence from the last thirty years is clear. Keynesian policies leave a massive trail of debt, weaker growth and falling real wages. Furthermore, once we look at each so-called stimulus plan, reality shows that the so-called multiplier effect of government spending is virtually nonexistent and has long-term negative implications for the health of the economy. Stimulus plans have bloated government size, which in turn requires more dollars from the real economy...

[This article is the foreword to Breaking Away: The Case of Secession, Decentralization, and Smaller Polities, by Ryan McMaken, available in PDF, at the Mises store, and on Amazon.] Classical liberal tradition defends the right of secession on many grounds. One of the main reasons is that the territorial dispersion of power limits political domination much more than formal constitutions do. Small states cannot easily adopt protectionist policies and their political...

More than ninety central banks worldwide are increasing interest rates. Bloomberg predicts that by mid-2023, the global policy rate, calculated as the average of major central banks’ reference rates weighted by GDP, will reach 5.5%. Next year, the federal funds rate is projected to reach 5.15 percent. Raising interest rates is a necessary but insufficient measure to combat inflation. To reduce inflation to 2%, central banks must significantly reduce their balance...

The U.S. personal savings rate eased in September to 3.1 percent from 3.4 percent in August. In September 2021 the savings rate stood at 7.9 percent. By popular thinking, a decline in the savings rate during an economic slowdown is regarded as supporting economic activity. In the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), savings are established as the difference between disposable money income and monetary outlays. Disposable income is defined as all personal...

An excellent new book from Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time, sets out to explain both the theory and history of interest rates across five millennia and countless cultures. The theory is frequently bungled by economists; the history is frequently glossed over by historians. But thankfully Mr. Chancellor is up to the task. He is an excellent and engaging writer, owing presumably to his long career as a financial journalist. We need more books like this....

In mid-November, while the whole world was focused on the Ukraine crisis, the US midterms or whatever other “big story” the media decided was more important, a truly momentous shift took place in the global financial system. It might seem like a small step on the surface, but it has the potential to bring about a real and possibly irreversible sea change in the way we use money; or better said, the way it uses us. As Reuters reported on the 15th of November, “Global...

The narrative to attack any tax cut and defend any increase in government size is reaching feverish levels. However, we must continue to remind citizens that constantly bloating government spending and increasing the size of monetary interventions are some of the causes of the widespread impoverishment of the middle class. Constantly increasing taxes and diminishing the purchasing power of the currency is wiping out the middle class in most developed nations....