There is no real housing market in the US. Instead, an unholy trinity of Fannie/Freddie, the US Treasury, and the Federal Reserve Bank operate to distort the market at every turn and drive home prices up dramatically. Mises Institute Senior Fellow Alex Pollock, an economist and former mortgage banker, joins Jeff to describe the reality few
On this first episode of the Fed Watch Podcast , Ryan McMaken and Senior Fellow Alex Pollock talk about how the Federal Reserve has negative cash flow. The Fed will print money to “solve” the problem. Be sure to follow the Fed Watch Podcast at Mises.org/FedPod . Recommended Reading “The Fed’s Capital Goes Negative” by Alex J. Pollock:
Switzerland’s central bank, the Swiss National Bank (SNB), lost $3.6 billion in 2023, after a gigantic loss of $150 billion in 2022. But after booking these losses, and properly subtracting them from its capital, the SNB still had positive capital of over $70 billion. This gives it the quite respectable capital to total assets ratio of 7.9%. All
Recorded at the 2022 Austrian Economics Research Conference hosted at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, March 18–19, 2022. The Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Yousif Almoayyed. The Austrian Economics Research Conference is the international, interdisciplinary meeting of the Austrian School, bringing together leading scholars
After thirteen years with on average negative real returns to conservative savings, it is time to require the Federal Reserve to address its impact on savers. Original Article: “ Since 2008, Monetary Policy Has Cost American Savers about $4 Trillion “ This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael
The Federal Reserve now owns $2.6 trillion in mortgages. That means about 24 percent of all outstanding residential mortgages in this whole big country reside in the central bank. Original Article: “ The Federal Reserve Keeps Buying Mortgages “ This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael
[This article appeared in the Letters section of The Wall Street Journal in a shortened form.] Jason Furman’s “ Profits and Losses Don’t Matter at the Federal Reserve ,” (September 28, 2023) excuses the unprecedented and previously unimaginable losses now being suffered by the Fed. These losses, which accrue to the Treasury and ultimately to
The Federal Reserve creates and manipulates the dominant fiat currency of the world. It produces the inflation of its supply and the continuous depreciation of its purchasing power. It manipulates dollar interest rates and the cost of debt, makes elastic the availability of credit (especially during financial crises), finances the government, and
Published in The Wall Street Journal : Mr. Levy describes the Fed’s permanent problem: It doesn’t and can’t know what the natural rate of interest is. Everyone should pity the members of the Federal Open Market Committee, who must inwardly confess that they can’t know the answers, yet have to play their parts in the Fed melodrama nonetheless. Alex
In The Price of Time , Edward Chancellor has given us a colorful and provocative review of the history, theory, and the profound effects of interest rates, the price that links the present and the future, which he argues is “the most important price of all.” The history runs from Hammurabi’s Code which in 1750 BC was “largely concerned with the
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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.