Austrian Economics

If one wants to see what happens when you use stimulus to help keep zombie companies alive and to resist reform efforts, look no further than Japan.  For twenty years now, Japan has been dealing with the consequences of a burst asset…

Steve Horwitz had an interesting read last week on Friedrich von Hayek, the Nobel Prize winning Austrian School economist. Von Hayek is best known for his 1944 Libertarian call to arms “Road to Serfdom” and is generally considered one of…

As a follow-up to my post on debt and it’s exclusion as a subject of merit amongst several schools of economic thought, I wanted to bring a New York Times article from 1988 to your attention. This article by Peter Kilborn, a Washington,…

I have been very interested in the concept of legal tender of late because of the revelation this summer that the State of California was issuing I.O.U.’s to honour its debts instead of paying in U.S. Dollars, which are legal tender and…

Ron Paul was on CNN this morning talking about unemployment, the credit crisis, the Federal Reserve and a lot more.

Putting the ‘change’ back in “change you can believe in”: The two faces of Barack Obama – Marshall Auerback Is this the Warren Christopher Presidency writ large? Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Marshall Auerback argues that the…

You have heard me use the phrase “liquidity is seeking return” to describe the increase in the price of riskier assets due to monetary stimulus. The Bloomberg News video clip below points to an increase in lending for buyers of riskier…

The Sector Financial Balances Model of Aggregate Demand—Revised - Scott Fullwiler A great but dense analysis of the 1990s expansion and the present fiscal crisis Hotter weather fed growth of Incan empire - New Scientist Incan and…

In the clearest signal yet that we are still in a potentially devastating global deflationary spiral, The Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank and the world’s oldest central bank, has effectively cut interest rates to minus 0.25% and has started…

The following is an excerpt from Murray Rothbard’s excellent book, “A History of Money and Banking in the United States.”  The passage outlines how the gold standard prevented governments from using inflation as a device to manipulate…