Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

It has been a full century since Mises dropped the economic calculation bomb, but the argument apparently still haunts socialists. It should, since Mises managed to show that a socialist economy is not an economy at all but calculational chaos. Yet it is curious that it does, since most have (incorrectly) concluded that Mises’s argument, after decades of debate, was debunked. Why does a presumably debunked argument still, drive even non-Austrian critics to pen new...

The editors are to be heartily congratulated for putting together this book, which covers an impressive range of topics in monetary economics from an explicitly Austrian perspective. Most of the twelve essays are of a very high quality and one will learn much about money and related topics by a careful reading of them. The chapters range from an insightful interpretation of Austrian monetary theory as a rehabilitation and development of classical monetary theory to...

The yearly growth rate of the US consumer price index (CPI) fell to 0.4 percent in April from 2 percent in April last year while the annual growth of the producer price index (PPI) plunged to –1.2 percent last month against 2.4 percent in April 2019. Furthermore, the yearly growth rate of the import price index fell to –6.8 percent in April from –0.2 percent in April last year. A general decline in the prices of goods and services is regarded as bad news since it is...

Economics has lost its way and the study has become both impotent and lacking in relevance. It’s easy to see how and why once we recognize that proper economic thinking takes place two steps beyond the apparent. Noneconomists typically take none of these steps, while modern economics has lost the ability to go beyond the first. This can, I think, be explained by economics’s increasing adoption of and reliance on mathematical and equilibrium models, which typically...

It has been a long time since I read anything by Paul Krugman, and seeing his most recent column simply reminds me why I’ve not missed anything. As both an extreme Keynesian and political partisan, he long ago abandoned economic analysis for something economists should recognize as nothing less than what Mises called metaphysics. Nonetheless, my curiosity got the best of me when he wrote that reopening the economy and allowing people to go to work almost surely will...

Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly John Quiggin Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019 xii + 390 pp. Abstract: John Quiggin’s Economics in Two Lessons alleges a failing in Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson: the absence of a discussion of market failure. Quiggin’s adherence to the doctrine of neoclassical equilibrium misses an important fact: the absence of a neoclassical equilibrium is not a recession, but...

Despite the unprecedented increase in the European Central Bank’s asset purchase program, the spread of southern European sovereign bonds versus German ones is rising. The ECB balance sheet has soared to more than 42 percent of the eurozone’s GDP, compared to the Fed 27 percent of US GDP. However, at the same time, excess liquidity has ballooned to more than €2.1 trillion. The ECB has been implementing aggressive asset purchases as well as negative rates for...

Fueled by unprecedented quantitative easing, central bank asset purchases, and various stimulus packages, the money supply growth rate ballooned in April to an all-time high. The growth rate has never been higher, with the 1970s as the only period that comes close. It was expected that money supply growth would surge in recent months. This usually happens in the wake of the early months of a recession or financial crisis. The magnitude of the growth rate, however,...

Over the years, one of the most common trump cards used to justify government treating people differently, rather than equally, has been the word need. And when used to override individuals’ ownership of themselves and what they produce, its usage has created confusion rather than clarity. In public discussion, “need” has increasingly morphed into one of its synonyms—essential, as in “essential jobs.” But it still suffers from many of the same analytical problems....

What typifies the phenomenon of the boom-bust cycle is that it is recurrent. What is the reason for this? Loose monetary policies set the platform for various activities that would not emerge without the easy monetary stance. What loose monetary policy does here is to engineer the transfer of real savings from wealth generating activities to artificially stimulated activities, which we can label as bubble activities. Over time, these loose monetary policies begin to...