Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

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...

Forget performing William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The real art form is politicking. They sport taxpayer-funded windbreakers, speak with authority and urgency, and lead a brigade of specialists. When a crisis unfolds, whether it is a hurricane or a virus outbreak, politicians stand before the cameras, appearing to be in control of the situation—but they see an opportunity. As the catastrophe intensifies, the public recoils in fear and cowers before their dear leaders,...

How bad is it? That is the question on everyone’s mind as we come to grips with the economic carnage caused by global economic shutdowns, supply chain disruptions, and ongoing quarantines of million of people. Do we face another Great Depression, or simply a deep recession more like 2008? And equally important, are soft Americans prepared for either? Have we started to process all of this psychologically? Have we really come to terms with the enormity of the...

[This article is part of the Understanding Money Mechanics series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in late 2020.] Starting with Carl Menger’s undisputed role in the “marginal revolution,” which ushered in subjective value theory, the Austrian school has made important contributions that have been absorbed into standard economic theory. However, the Austrian theory of the business cycle is still something unique to the school, differing not...