Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

Last year, just as it was becoming increasingly clear that price inflation was mounting, Jerome Powell repeatedly denied there was any reason for concern. He called inflation “transitory.” A few months later, he admitted it was not transitory, but denied it was “entrenched.” Then, by late 2021, he admitted price inflation was getting out of control but still took no action of any consequence. Through it all, the Powell plan was repeated delay and opposition to any...

At the core of the entrepreneurial orientation that is the engine of vibrant, growing, value-creating, customer-first businesses, we find the principles of subjectivism and subjective value. Subjective value embraces not only the value the customer seeks, but also the value that entrepreneurs establish in their companies: capital value. Once businesses master these two principles in combination, they can open new horizons of innovation and growth. Key Takeaways...

In a piece of news that shocked the mainstream media, but which shocked no one familiar with the academic industry writ large, retired US Army general John Allen was forced to resign as president of the Brookings Institution after it was revealed the FBI was investigating him for lobbying on behalf of the Qatari monarchy. Of course, the real news, scarcely noted by the Washington Post, New York Times, or any other purported paper of record, is that Allen was only...

With a recession looming over the average American, the group to blame is pretty obvious, this group being the central bankers at the Federal Reserve, who inflate the supply of currency in the system, that currency being the dollar. This is what inflation is, the expansion of the money supply either through the printing press or adding zeros to a computer screen. It has gotten so bad that in the last twenty-two months, 80 percent of all US dollars in existence have...

Real wages are falling, inflation is at a 40-year high, and the Atlanta Fed predicts we’ll find GDP growth at zero for the second quarter. Meanwhile, both the yield curve and money-supply growth point to recession.  But when it comes to the latest data on home prices, there’s still no sign of any deflation or even moderation. For example, the latest Case-Shiller home price data shows home prices surged above 20 percent year-over-year in April, marking yet another...

The average card-carrying Austrian would say that the Federal Reserve is creating money by the bale, with evidence being Consumer Price Index prints of 8.6 percent per the Bureau of Labor Statistics or over 15 percent per John Williams’s shadowstats.com computation based on the way the government calculated CPI back in 1980. Surely, at best, the US dollar is only the cleanest dirty shirt in the currency laundry basket. But Uncle Sam’s dollar continues to strengthen...

The economy consists of a huge chain of the division of labor that is interlocked to such a limit where there exists hardly any single individual or firm that produces the whole of the product alone. This is famously illustrated in the essay “I, Pencil,” by Leonard Read. Each element of this complex chain is a firm that consists of many individuals, therefore one of the first questions one might ask is, “Why do individuals engage in these complex economic...

Year-over-year PPI growth came in at over 10 percent for the sixth month in a row. This will put more pressure on the Fed to “do something.” Original Article: “Wholesale Prices Rise More than 10 Percent, Pointing to Continued Price Hikes” The US Bureau of Labor Statistics released new Producer Price Index (PPI) data today, and it’s not good news for consumers. The PPI is a measure of prices at the production phase of goods and services, and is often an indicator...

(The following text is a revised update of an article that was first published in 2005.) The recent outbreak of price inflation with the jump to an annual rate of 8.6 percent in May 2022 came as a surprise to the US central bank (the Federal Reserve). Having ignored the warnings of the Austrian school economists, the policy makers were paralyzed in the face of a phenomenon they deemed impossible to happen. None of their forecasting models had triggered an inflation...

When the Bourbon dynasty was restored to power in France in the early 1800s after Napoleon’s abdication, the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand famously said of that family: “They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” In modern economic parlance, one can say the same thing about progressives, who once again are demanding price controls to “fight inflation.” Not surprisingly, Sen. Elizabeth Warren is leading the way. She recently introduced a bill...