[ The Inflation Crisis, and How to Resolve It • By Henry Hazlitt • Ludwig von Mises Institute, [1978] 2009 • 191 pages; and Beyond Boom and Crash • By Robert L. Heilbroner • W.W. Norton, 1987 • 111 pages; and Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises • By Charles P. Kindleberger • Basic Books, 1987 • 320 pages.] “If this were a
We are all familiar with the power gained by trade unions in present-day Europe. Lately, it seems that they have also gained the privilege to turn to violence each time their demands aren’t met. It’s safe to say that a union’s decision has become as important as a governmental decree. Trade unions set wages, working time, retirement age, and
Agora — “market” — was the name for the public place in the center of ancient Hellenic cities. Spanish film director Alejandro Amenábar recently gave his new movie the same dignified title. It tells the story of Hypatia of Alexandria, a wise and proud woman, a teacher of philosophy and astronomy at the library of that old metropolis. During those
Randall W. Forsyth, writing for Barron’s early spring 2009, wrote about Austrian economists, “Their ideas warned us of the bubble; their prescription for the bust is too harsh, however.” Now that the NBER has announced that the current “Great Recession” ended in June 2009, after 18 months, let’s reexamine this claim. First, the end date clearly
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,
In a recent interview in the New Yorker , Eugene Fama, Chicago School economist and father of the efficient-markets hypothesis (EMH), defended his theory in light of the housing boom and crash. Fama’s views on asset bubbles and business cycles stand in sharp contrast to the standard Austrian position. Although Chicago and Austrian economists are
In response to a post by Martin Wolf on the Austrian theory of the business cycle, UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong made a list of positions that he attributes to the Austrians. Not surprisingly, DeLong is not too impressed with (his own understanding of) the Austrian view. Unfortunately, DeLong’s list contains views that are not the “Austrian”
Anyone who follows financial markets has to wonder at times, “What are people thinking? How did they come to make those decisions?” It’s hard to imagine that John Muth and Robert Lucas came up with what’s known as the “rational-expectations theory,” wherein, as explained in Wikipedia, it is assumed that outcomes that are being forecast do not
[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
The business end of the business cycle does the dirty work of clearing away the malinvestments made during the previous boom. These malinvestments are a stark reminder of what was hot and now is not. Cheap and abundant money flowed into real-estate projects after the tech bubble burst and the Fed hit the monetary gas. Sand states like Arizona,
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.