The Candian National Post reports, in an article Gold’s rise points to inflation on David Ranson, president of an econometric consulting firm. Ranson defines inflation as a decline in the purchasing power of a national currency. He prefes that definition to flawed ones like the rising cost of living or increasing labour costs. Official
Gerard Jackson takes on Alan Wood and Robert Shiller on the cause of speculative asset price bubbles in Medieval booms and historical and economic amnesia . Wood, citing Shiller, identifies media hype as the cause of speculative manias. Jackson responds that boom and bust cycles have been evident in times and places without news media. The only
Writer James Grant, publisher of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer , debates Professor Jeremey Seigel, author of several books on stock market investing, on NPR’s On Point program . Streaming audio is available , but as of yet I have been unable to find a podcast. Grant, known for his Austrian views on central banking and the business cycle , makes
The New York Times along with most of the other financial media reports that Japan has finally achieved what many Federsal Reserve economists (see for example 1 , 2 , 3 ) , including Bernanke and (non-Fed economist) Paul Krugman have identified as the key goal for Japanese economic health: positive inflation. Krugman, as economist Benjamin Powell
Cheuvreux, the brokerage arm of the French Credit Agricole, has issued a report on the gold market . The Cheuvreux report cites Mises in three places (pages 4, 41, and 43). The report endorses the research of GATA , an organization that has been alleging central bank manipulation of the gold market. The major conclusion of the report is that the
Should central bankers actively undertake to burst asset bubbles, or should they stand around and watch them run out of steam, then try to clean up the mess by cutting interest rates? This has been the subject of a recent round of debate between central bank economists and other interest macro thinkers: Greenspan Fans at Jackson Hole May Differ on
It’s finally happening. Some of us, who have been writing about the US housing bubble for several years now, underestimated how long it would last. But as Ben Jones has exhaustively documented at his excellent Housing Bubble 2 Blog , bubble cities around the country are all starting to see the following trends : Rising inventories since January 1,
Edward Chancellor, author of a very expensive report on the credit bubble, and the classic Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation presented a talk last summer to the Global Borrowers and Investors Forum on The Destabilizing Stability of the Greenspan Era . The talk analyzes “the Greenspan Reflation”. First he presents
Daniel Gros , Director of of Centre for European Policy Studies, has two interesting papers on his site, both dealing with anomalies in the balance of payment statistics: Foreign Investment in the US (I): Disappearing in a black hole? Foreign Investment in the US (II):Being taken to the cleaners? Gros shows that, to take the official statistics at
This week’s eWeek features an article Microsoft Security Pricing: Predatory or Correctional? . The problem, it seems, is that MS has priced its security products “way below fair market value”, according to Alex Eckelberry, president of a competing security software company. McEckelberry is quoted as accusing MS of “endangering the entire security
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.