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
How many times have you heard the unthinking comment that we need to keep consumption burning brightly because “consumption is two-thirds of GDP”? There it is, after all, in black and white. If you look up the GDP release, you see that, in 2001, nominal GDP was $10 trillion dollars and change, while personal consumption expenditures were a touch
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
From either side of the Atlantic, two of the more influential proselytes of that degenerate old collectivist, John Maynard Keynes, have chosen to re-iterate all the old myths once again. ‘Now the corporate sector at large doesn’t merely want to reduce its net borrowings but actually in many cases wants to become a net saver. In the language of
How much comfort can the U.S. take in the sufferings of Japan? In a side-by-side comparison of the productivity of the two economies, the U.S. comes off looking worse than one might expect, while Japan, long in the mire of recession, not as badly as one might assume. True, this little examination may seem misplaced now that Resona Bank, Japan’s
Inflation tends not only to pressure, but to increase, the maldistribution of labour between industries, which must produce unemployment as soon as the inflation ceases. F.A. Hayek, Open or Repressed Inflation , 1969. The failings of the Macromancers who dominate contemporary economic reasoning can be encapsulated as follows: if you can’t leave
We have seen the temperature rise along the corridors of power in recent days as finance ministers, central bankers, and others have clamored to have their say on the current disruption in international capital and goods markets. This disruption has its roots in America’s Military Keynesianism and the Asian Mercantilist response it has elicited.
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
For all the folly and plain bad thinking at work in the world - all of which works to hinder wealth creation - there is one special breed of man who can offer us hope: that of the Entrepreneur. Holding out for a hero In our work today, we are constantly confronted with the struggle to determine who exactly it is who is prospering honestly and who
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.