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The first thing to know about Dr. Thomas E. Woods, Jr.’s’ book Our Enemy, the Fed is he’s giving it away. Click the link, get your copy and read the whole book. Clearly, such intellectual charity is not only rare but in the educational spirit of Mises.org. The subject matter is light-heavy but Woods, author of the bestseller Meltdown (reviewed here), navigates it with the smooth skill of a master, making the reader experience satisfying from beginning to end.

The title reflects another insight, paralleling as it does Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State. Most of us were raised to believe government and its agencies serve our best interests. As libertarian scholarship has shown the truth is the exact opposite, particularly with government’s sleazy relationship with money and banking. Admittedly, it’s a hard idea to accept since it involves a pernicious breach of trust, but Woods makes it abundantly clear. To our overlords we are easily-duped chattel.

Until Ron Paul decided to run for president and his End the Fed came along in 2009, the general public was mostly blind to the Fed’s existence. Austrians aside, the few who knew something about it — mostly university-trained economists on the take from the Fed — considered it a vital part of an advanced industrial economy. Yet the Fed had been around for 96 years when Dr. Paul’s book emerged. Given that it’s in charge of the money we use how did it remain in the shadows for tax-burdened citizens for nearly a century? What’s up with that?

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis tells us the Fed’s congressional assignment is “to promote maximum employment and price stability.” (Bold in original) For these it talks about interest rates, and its aim is to increase the money supply so that prices rise gently at or around a 2 percent rate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Curious Case of Missing Defaults

November 1, 2017

CAMBRIDGE – Booms and busts in international capital flows and commodity prices, as well as the vagaries of international interest rates, have long been associated with economic crises, especially – but not exclusively – in emerging markets. The “type” of crisis varies by time and place. Sometimes the “sudden stop” in capital inflows sparks a currency crash, sometimes a banking crisis, and quite often a sovereign default. Twin and triple crises are not uncommon.

Rising international interest rates have usually been bad news for countries where the government and/or the private sector rely on external borrowing. But for many emerging markets, external conditions began to worsen around 2012, when China’s growth slowed, commodity prices plummeted, and capital flows dried up – developments that sparked a spate of currency crashes spanning nearly every region.

In my recent work with Vincent Reinhart and Christoph Trebesch, I show that over the past two centuries, this “double bust” (in commodities and capital flows) has led to a spike in sovereign defaults, usually with a lag of 1-3 years. Yet, since the peak in commodity prices and global capital flows around 2011, the incidence of sovereign defaults worldwide has risen only modestly.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why We Need a Recession

January 20, 2016

Why We Need a Recession

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a recession is defined as a “significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months.” Often, this is understood as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth as measured by a country’s GDP.

Public opinion is generally quite simple in regard to recession: upswings are generally welcomed, recessions are to be avoided. The “Austrians” are however at odds with this general consensus — we regard recessions as healthy and necessary. Economic downturns only correct the aberrations and excesses of a boom. The benefits of recessions include:

Sclerotic structures in the labor market are broken up and labor costs decline.
Productivity and competitiveness increase.
Misallocations are corrected and unprofitable investments abandoned, written off, or liquidated.
Government mismanagement of the economy is exposed.
Investors and entrepreneurs who were taking too great risks suffer losses and prices adjust to reflect consumer preferences.
Recessions also allow a restructuring of production processes.

At the end of the corrective process, the foundation for a renewed upswing is more stable and healthy. We thus see deflationary corrections as a precondition for growth in prosperity that is sustainable in the long term. Ludwig von Mises understood this when he observed:

The return to monetary stability does not generate a crisis. It only brings to light the malinvestments and other mistakes that were made under the hallucination of the illusory prosperity created by the easy money.

Can the Government Save Face?

However, in addition to leading to true temporary hardship for the malinvestment-affected areas of the economy, an economic recession in the near future would represent a harsh loss of face for central bankers. Their controversial monetary policy measures were justified as an appropriate means to nurse the economy back to health. That is, their efforts to end or avoid helpful recessions were claimed to contribute to the eagerly awaited self-sustaining recovery.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Economics Matters

September 4, 2015

Why Economics Matters

This article is a selection from a June 19 presentation at a lunchtime meeting of the Grassroot Institute in Honolulu at the Pacific Club. The talk was part of the Mises Institute’s Private Seminar series for lay audiences. To schedule your own Private Seminar with a Mises Institute speaker, please contact Kristy Holmes at the Mises Institute.

First let me say that what we today call “Austrian economics” flows from the great legacy of classical economics, with the very important modification economists now call the “marginal revolution.” Austrian economics is also a term that describes a healthy and vibrant (though often oppositional) modern school of economic thought. It originated with intellectual giants like Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises, names I’m sure many of you are familiar with. These economists were from Austria, hence the term.

There was a landmark conference at South Royalton, Vermont in 1974, attended by the likes of Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman, that revitalized the Austrian movement and helped it regain prominence in the latter part of the twentieth century. Milton Friedman was in attendance, and that’s when he famously remarked that “There is only good economics and bad economics.”

And of course that’s true. Schools of thought should not be rigid, or dogmatic, or too narrowly defined. But classifying various economists and theories into groups or family trees does indeed help us make sense of economics. It helps us understand how we arrived at a time and place where Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman, Thomas Piketty, and Christine Lagarde are viewed as modern mainstream thinkers rather than the radicals they are when compared to the whole history of the field.

Image courtesy of Peter Cresswell.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Debunking Keynesian “History”: The Gold Standard Had Nothing To Do With Panics And Busts | David Stockman’s Contra Corner

December 12, 2014

Debunking Keynesian “History”: The Gold Standard Had Nothing To Do With Panics And Busts | David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

One of the main reasons that detractors of the gold standard contend it is a “barbarous relic” (in John Maynard Keynes’s phrase) is that it was implicated in so many financial panics and economic busts back in its heyday in the 19^th century. As the New York Times’ pet Internet troll once put it, sarcastically, “under the gold standard, America had no major financial panics other than in 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, 1907, 1930, 1931, 1932, and 1933. Oh, wait….returning to the gold standard is an almost comically (and cosmically) bad idea.”

Looking at the 19^th century, before the gold standard became a ghost, a dead-letter in the early era of the Federal Reserve from 1913-33, there is no evidence that the good old thing was implicated in any panic or bust. Certainly not in 1873, when the United States was still contemplating returning to the gold standard that it had abrogated in the civil war the decade prior.

Certainly not in the other famous panics of the 19^th century, every one of which had at its root some form of extensive government meddling in the economy.

Not the panic of 1819—caused by the misallocation ofcapital owing to the U.S.’s printing, during the War of 1812, of fiat paper currency (some of which was so transparently desperate it paid interest). Not the panic of 1837, caused by undue speculation in land sparked by Congressional goading following “Indian removal.” Not the panic of 1857—caused by a collapse in railroad shares on the basis of over-investment encouraged again by federal policy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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Image courtesy of Peter Cresswell.

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