Recent days have seen eerie parallels to the late Summer of 1987, when one Alan Greenspan – viewed then with suspicion as a political placeman – took the helm of the Federal Reserve at a time when international tensions were high, the U.S. was in the grip of a speculative orgy of stock buying and takeover activity, and when the Greenback was
The Keynesians are claiming that we have nothing to worry about because there can be no inflation within a recession. The monetarists, meanwhile, say we must fight deflation and flood the market with liquidity to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s. Greenspan is telling us to “Pick a card, any card,” or whatever hucksterism he is now employing to keep
Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and Boston Fed President Cathy Minehan have been telling us that the check is in the mail. Once everybody receives a few hundred of their own dollars back from Leviathan, the economy will come roaring back. We’ll carry on with a productivity-driven market rally, while the Baby Boomers can resume planning for their
Confronted with a slumping economy that threatens to get worse, Alan Greenspan, like his predecessors in the 1920s, is making all the wrong choices and failing to learn from history. Back in July 1927, Governor Montagu Norman’s problems at the Bank of England were mounting. Great Britain was stripped of its assets in the Great War and of its
It is at times like these that we in the financial sector are humbled in the presumption of our own importance and of the meaning of our works. Daily, we chase the ebb and flow of symbols and numbers across the screens and ticker tapes of the world, seeking to distill from them a fleeting pattern, or to recognize within them some more enduring
The reopening of the U.S. stock market was an operation tinged with the same anxieties as grips a delinquent student on opening his exam results, or a driver with a criminal record being pulled over by the State’s most feared tax-gatherers, the traffic cops. Whatever direction the market may take in the future, its opening day was a time for
A couple of news items, in case you missed them: A single-minded Congress is nearing . . . a pact covering next year’s spending for schools, the military and other programs . . . the unanimous vote underlined how the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have drained away any taste . . . for a budget battle this fall. . . . Meanwhile, White House officials
The Fed’s Open Market Committee, that supposed bulwark against monetary profligacy, has opened the floodgates with its latest move to push the federal funds rate to a forty-year low. It’s the ninth cut this year, and the one that pushes the real rate of interest 1.3 percent below the median measure of CPI. We are now waiting for just two of the
Despite yet another half-point cut in interest rates from three of the world’s more important central banks--as well as various reductions from a host of their satellites--the noose is gradually tightening around banks and financial institutions everywhere, not just in the Asia, but in the U.S., Europe, and Canada, too, as news arrives of multiple
How do you to turn a recession into something worse? Easy. The same way you turn a drunk into an alcoholic: keep dragging him back to the bar, filling his drink, and telling him to forget all his cares. U.S. personal consumption expenditures rallied strongly in October--so much so, in fact, that, adding back the spurious $60 billion deducted in
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.