Last night CNBC premiered “ The Bubble Decade ” with host David Faber looking back at the three boom-and-bust episodes of the past 10 years–tech, real estate and private equity. It will replay Sunday and no doubt many more times in the coming weeks and months. Leaving aside the analysis at the end, the program is quite good. No, the Austrian
The same week that MGM’s $8.5 billion CityCenter is unveiled, the Sahara Hotel has closed two of its hotel towers for the holidays due to low demand . This closure comes on the heels of Binion’s closing its 365 rooms downtown. October marked the 22nd straight month of declining gaming revenues in Nevada and was the lowest single-month figure since
An interesting piece of correspondence today from a person who observed how easy money dramatically transformed the technology industry, from rationality into mania. I am deeply involved in the technology industry-- specifically computer software and the Internet-- and I lived through the tech bubble. What impressed me about the tech bubble
Hope is everywhere this spring despite the awful economic numbers. The corner of Washington DC & Wall Street and its cheerleaders on CNBC have their noses stuck in Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking . No matter how dreadful the smoothed and sanitized government statistics are when released, instead of bombshells, these stats
Nine banks with a total of 153 offices were seized last evening, opening today as branches of the appropriately named U.S. Bank. “The FDIC and U.S. Bank entered into a loss-share transaction on approximately $14.4 billion of the combined purchased assets of $18.2 billion. U.S. Bank will share in the losses on the asset pools covered under the
“Commercial real estate is also dependent on finance, but it’s far less of a driver for the banks,” Susan Wachter opined in a recent edition of the Opelika-Auburn News. And while Ms. Wachter, a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, is right to be bearish on the prospects for commercial real
The City Journal runs a wonderful piece on inflation’s moral cost by Theodore Dalrymple: But asset inflation–ultimately, the debasement of the currency–as the principal source of wealth corrodes the character of people. It not only undermines the traditional bourgeois virtues but makes them ridiculous and even reverses them. Prudence becomes
“Good evening. Some of us come to the ends of our roads unexpectedly. Others of us receive a final blessing; we’re told we have a few months to put our affairs in order. “I’ve made plenty of mistakes; I’m deeply sorry for them. But I got to thinking, is there one last thing I should still do to help the country that has done so much for me and my
Here is a piece I wrote back in 2005. I hope you enjoy it. This week is likely the sweet spot of the holiday party season for most working folks. Thankfully, there are a few employers who still open up the bar and turn those in their employ loose with some free alcohol to celebrate the holiday season. Of course, the larger the organization, the
Vin Suprynowicz writes in his column “Extending the recession indefinitely” that continual government interference during the Great Depression served only to delay economic adjustment and recovery. “This was all proved, laboriously, in spades, from 1929 to 1938, all brilliantly analyzed and explained by the late Murray N. Rothbard, with whom I had
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.