As Bob Murphy and I discussed on the Human Action Podcast, economists and financial news media are already declaring macroeconomic victory by claiming that the Federal Reserve has achieved a “soft landing,” meaning that they have raised interest rates just enough to quell price inflation without causing a crisis or recession. Even Fed Chair Jerome
Paul Krugman, in an article titled “ None Dare Call It Victory ,” calls on the Fed to change its inflation target from two to three percent, which would mean that the Fed could go ahead and reverse course on tightening, since at least one official price inflation measure has reached 2.9 percent. He gives some reasons for three percent (or, as he
Abstract: Austrian economists have debated issues of monetary theory and inflation extensively, but there is still no agreement on the definition of inflation. Mises (1953, 240) defined inflation as an increase in the supply of money not offset by an increase in the demand for money, leading to a fall in the purchasing power of money (PPM).
The Economist, a disappointing magazine, has a fittingly disappointing list of “What to read to understand how economists think.” It’s one of their “evergreen” articles that they repost from time to time. It includes Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom , Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers , Dubner and Levitt’s Freakonomics , and two lesser-known
The Federal Trade Commission has filed a lawsuit against Amazon, claiming that it wields monopoly power in online retail. According to the FTC, Amazon “is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power.” Here are some of the strategies included in the official complaint :
Bank stocks are still floundering after they took a major hit in March of this year, coinciding with the failures of Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic Bank, and Signature Bank. KRE, a regional banking ETF, is down 27 percent year-to-date, while KBE, an ETF with large banks, is down 16 percent year-to-date. Quarterly earnings will be reported by
Jonathan Weil at the Wall Street Journal reports that Republic First Bancorp (not to be confused with First Republic Bank, which failed earlier this year) is in trouble . It is suffering the same kinds of problems that sank Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank in March 2023. What’s funny is that even though Republic First
Last year, Joseph Salerno cautioned against the use of year-over-year CPI inflation rate calculations . This way of calculating the annual inflation rate is backward looking, because the most recent monthly rate is heavily outweighed by the previous eleven months’ rates. In contrast, calculating the annual inflation rate by compounding and
Having trouble finding an old Mises Wire article? It appears that Google has demoted and delisted Mises.org content, especially if it is over two years old. For example, try finding Ryan McMaken’s 2016 article, “ Has the CIA been Politicized? ” with a Google search. You will probably find webpages that have reprinted the article, and you may see
Kudos to Emre Kuvvet for acquiring the Fed’s mythical “Doomsday Book” by FOIA request and sharing it. Emre published a short article on it in the WSJ today, and he has a longer article coming in the Spring 2024 issue of the Independent Review . It’s “an internal document used to guide the Federal Reserve’s actions during emergencies.” It is mainly
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.