Since the end of April 2001, the US dollar price of a troy ounce of gold has risen from US$264 to US$747 as of October 1, 2007 (Fig. 1) (November 1 spot is $783); in that period, gold has even “outperformed” the US stock market. To put it in less pleasant terms: the exchange value of the US dollar vis-à-vis gold — the world’s ultimate, freely
[ Complicit: How Greed and Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable • By Mark Gilbert • Bloomberg Press, 2010 • 192 pages] “Sanity remained in short supply.” – Mark Gilbert, Complicit Complicit , by Mark Gilbert, the London bureau chief for Bloomberg financial news, is unusual — a book concerning our recently demised speculative boom that you
At the Mises Academy we are just wrapping up the inaugural class , on the Austrian theory of the business cycle. During the class, one issue that came up repeatedly was whether the Mises/Hayek story of the trade cycle could occur on a completely free market, using gold as money and a banking system that operated on 100 percent reserves. As any
World Bank president Robert Zoellick has stirred up a hornet’s nest with his recent call for a return to a gold anchor in the global financial system. The usual suspects immediately denounced him, with Keynesian Brad DeLong anointing Zoellick the “ Stupidest Man Alive .” In the present article I’ll explain the resurging interest in the yellow
As pointed out by Professor Kirzner (2001, pp. 137, 140), Mises did not start out with the intent to develop a theory of the trade cycle. The trade cycle argument first appeared in the last few pages of The Theory of Money and Credit (1912). This early development of Austrian business cycle theory was a direct manifestation of Mises’s rejection of
In the midst of the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression, some economists are currently trying to come up with answers as to how to stabilize the financial system. Most experts are of the view that greater control of financial markets is the answer. The late professor Milton Friedman would have been dismayed by such ideas. He
In his interview with the CNBC on November 9, 2010, a highly regarded Wall Street economist, Nouriel Roubini, the cofounder and chairman of Roubini Global Economics, said that a gold standard is unlikely to stabilize the financial system. On the contrary, holds Roubini, such a standard can only make things much worse. For instance, argues Roubini,
[Excerpted from chapter 4 of The Driver (1922). An MP3 audio version of this article, excerpted from the audiobook by Jeff Riggenbach, is available as a free download .] You may define a mass delusion; you cannot explain it really. It is a malady of the imagination, incurable by reason, that apparently must run its course. If it does not lead
[An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Keith Hocker, is available for download .] In his extraordinary book Democracy: The God that Failed , Hans-Hermann Hoppe points out that the process of civilization is stopped when government continually violates property rights. The natural process of civilization comes through delaying
[This article originally appeared in The Freeman , May 1979.] The present worldwide inflation has done, and will continue to do, immense harm. But it may eventually lead to one great achievement. It may make it possible to restore (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say to create ) a full 100 percent gold standard. That could come about in a
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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.