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
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
The following extract neatly sums up why monetarists and Keynesians are both wrong in their prescriptions about the need to use easy money and Big Government to boost “effective” demand. From The National Federation of Independent Business April Survey: “The economy is splitting with the services sector improving and the goods sector suffering,”
Corrigan heads Capital Insight , a financial consultancy. He was interviewed at the Mises Institute prior to his lecture on the “What Happened to Recovery?” MISES.ORG : It seems like the Austrian story of the boom is getting out there. CORRIGAN : My sense is that many Austrians have described the process of the boom very well. The literature deals
Forget Greenspan’s timorous optimism about the economy—after all, ask yourself when, in the course of the whole dirty dozen of futile rate cuts, he last talked its prospects down ? No. Just like the tired old stock promoter he is, Bookie Al always thinks better days are ‘round the corner, so puh-leeze, People, let’s perform our own analysis
“One way to make sure that the manufacturing sector does well is to send a message overseas, [to] say, look, we expect there to be a fair playing field when it comes to trade. See, we in America believe we can compete with anybody, just so long as the rules are fair, and we intend to keep the rules fair.” Dubya-Dubya-III in Richfield , Ohio In a
Just when you thought that threat of DISINflation (a Good Thing, the Fed tells us) turning into DEFlation (A V-E-R-Y Bad Thing) had vanished and that instead we were on the verge of INflation (A Not Quite So Bad Thing), up pops another frightful creature from the Fearsome ‘Flation Family—STAGflation! For example, Bloomberg News recently ran a
Suppose that company HN has been used to selling cars for cash at $10,000 apiece, but that business has been a little slow lately. Faced with the imperative to re-energize the dealership, inspiration strikes some genius in the marketing department. Shortly afterward, he emerges smiling from a lunch with one of his buddies up in finance and makes
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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.