George Selgin has written an interesting post on Hayek and free banking . Unfortunately, his otherwise instructive post is marred by a few lapses of scholarship. In a nutshell, Selgin credits Hayek with inspiring him and others to create the “Modern Free Banking School.” Selgin argues that Hayek was a life-long opponent of free banking,
Recently, the Financial Times published an article containing charts displaying the correlation between government spending and real GDP growth. Based on these correlations, the author of the article, Matthew Klein, comments: “It’s no secret that spending cuts (and tax hikes) have retarded America’s growth for the past four years.” He goes on to
Last week the Greek government imposed capital controls to prevent cash from escaping from the Greek banking system, which is on the brink of collapse. These repressive financial measures, which were invented by “Hitler’s banker” Hjalmar Schacht in the 1930s, include the closing of banks, limiting cash withdrawals from ATMs to 60 euros ($67)
A few hours ago, a Greek minister for administrative reform, G eorge Katrougalos, told a radio station in Athens that reopening the banks “probably is not technically possible this week.” The minister’s choice of words is, to be charitable, less then ingenuous. Even with capital controls in place that limit the daily amount that can be
Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the IMF, revealed that it was a ”a bit of a surprise” that she was not informed in advance of the Swiss National Bank’s decision to dissolve the the inflationary peg with the euro. Of course, the modus operandi of central banks is to keep the public in the dark about their imminent changes in policy or to
There has been much hand wringing among popular blogger-economists in response to the breaking of the Euro peg by the SNB. Tyler Cowen , Paul Krugman , and Scott Sumner all lament the loss of “credibility” by the SNB in the wake of its sudden change of policy regime and they darkly hint at dire consequences for the Swiss economy. But the problem
Bloomberg reports that the yield on more than $4 trilllion of sovereign debt has turned negative. Investors are now paying the Swiss government to borrow from them for longer than a decade and paying the German government to borrow for a lustrum . For all Euro-area nations, according to Bloomberg calculations, average yields on sovereign debt
A new survey by American Express reveals that 29 percent of Americans keep at least some of their “savings” in cash. Overall 53 percent of cash holders stash their cash in a domestic hiding place. Surprisingly, 67 percent of dollar bill and coin hoarders among the millennial generation secrete cash around their domicile. A 2012 Marist College
In an interview with CNBC today Danielle DiMartino Booth, a former adviser to recently retired Dallas Fed president Dick Fisher, refers to Ludwig von Mises as ”my long-departed hero.” She notes that Mises ”coined the term malinvestment” and “wrote about it extensively.” She characterizes the housing crisis as a “very identifiable bubble”
The manager of one of Great Britain’s biggest bond funds, which has £ 4 billion under management, is now advising investors that the time has come “to hold physical cash,” along with gold and silver. He sees “systemic risk in the system” and is concerned that global debt, particularly mortgage debt, has been inflated to record levels by
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.