All Posts Tagged With: "deflation"
What’s Up with Inflation?
Inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) has been almost nonexistent for several years, though it started creeping higher in the first half of 2011. Yet many prices have been rising at double-digit percentage rates. Are official figures trustworthy? And what of expectations? There is a great deal of buzz right now about inflation [...]
22Jun2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 14 comments | Continued“F” as in Fed
The Federal Reserve, America’s fatally conceited monetary central planner, is not terribly popular these days—which is cause for hope—and now we have a report card on the entire Fed era that strongly supports the view that we’d be better off without it. At the very least, as the authors suggest, the burden of proof is [...]
24Feb2011 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedAre We Headed for Deflation – or Inflation?
The inflation wolf may well be at the door, but we need to do a better job of explaining why the current situation exists.
15Sep2010 | William L. Anderson | 5 comments | ContinuedBoom and Bust: Crisis and Response
America has experienced a classic economic boom and bust, which I first chronicled in the November 2007 Freeman. Ill-conceived policies to encourage homeownership channeled cheap credit into housing markets. Land-use and zoning policies restricted the supply of housing in key desirable markets. In The Housing Boom and Bust, Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution has [...]
24Feb2010 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. | 2 comments | ContinuedDeflation: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
During the current recession a number of commentators have made various comparisons to the Great Depression, mostly because of the dramatic decline in the stock market and ongoing troubles in the financial industry. When oil prices also began a dramatic decline in the autumn of 2008, pulling the overall consumer price level downward for the [...]
5Jan2010 | Steven Horwitz | 59 comments | ContinuedHow Much Money Does an Economy Need?
In How Much Money Does an Economy Need? Hunter Lewis addresses some of the most fundamental questions of monetary policy in a question-and-answer format. For a subject often clouded by technicalities, the language is refreshingly plain. Sometimes too plain, perhaps, to satisfy an academic economist. But academic economists aren’t the intended audience. The book can [...]
15Oct2009 | Lawrence H. White | 1 comment | ContinuedMr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond
Veteran financial writer James Grant describes himself as a “Grover Cleveland Democrat”—that is, someone who believes strongly in sound money, free trade, and very limited government. Mr. Market Miscalculates is a collection of his essays published in “Grant’s Interest Rate Observer” over the last decade. While most financial writers credulously accept the notion that central [...]
24Apr2009 | George C. Leef | Comments Off | ContinuedDeflation: The Bogeyman of Bankers and Confused Economists
Excellent article on this currently popular topic from the FEE vault: The Dreaded D Word by Christopher Mayer
15Dec2008 | Mason Drake | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Current Economic Crisis and the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle
Richard Ebeling is completing his tenure as the president of FEE. This fall he will teach economics at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. The current financial crisis emerged out of an economic boom that began in 2003 and saw rising stock values, increasing home prices, and high levels of employment and production. The upturn followed [...]
1Jun2008 | Richard M. Ebeling | 4 comments | ContinuedCapital Letters
Poor Definitions of “Deflation” and “Inflation” To the Editor: Contrary to Stephen Davies’s March column, “The History of ‘Deflation,’” traditionally and historically, “inflation” referred to a “large” increase in the quantity of money, “deflation” to a “large” decrease. These definitions were not scientifically precise, for what is “large” was always debatable. Moreover, the quantity of [...]
1Jun2003 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedThe History of Deflation
Lately a new word has made an appearance in economic commentary and journalism. Or, rather, it is now being used in its original, correct meaning. That word is “deflation.” Used correctly, it means a general decline in prices, or a steady increase in the value, or purchasing power, of a given unit of money. For [...]
1Mar2003 | Stephen Davies | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Dreaded D Word
Deflation is a much-feared economic phenomenon, perhaps because it is most often associated with the Great Depression of the 1930s or with the recent troubles in Japan. and yet deflation has not always been coincident with periods of depression. The general record of the nineteenth century, in sharp contrast to that of the twentieth, was [...]
1May2002 | Christopher Mayer | 1 comment | ContinuedChina’s Flirtation with Keynesian Economics
China’s economy has made enormous progress since modernization began in 1978 under the direction of Deng Xiaoping. However, while no one expects the transition from communism toward market-based economies to be painless, the full truth is much more brutal in that China’s economic future may be rather bleak. After nearly 50 years of experimenting with [...]
1Dec1999 | Christopher Lingle | 1 comment | ContinuedMoney in the 1920s and 1930s
Richard Timberlake is a professor of economics retired from the University of Georgia, and author of Monetary Policy in the United States, An Intellectual and Institutional History (University of Chicago Press, 1993). This article is the first in a series. One of the most enduring and troublesome mysteries in economics is money: how it is [...]
1Apr1999 | Richard H. Timberlake | 3 comments | ContinuedA Golden Comeback, Part I
“A more timeless measure is needed; gold fits the bill perfectly.” —Mark Mobius When speaking of the Midas metal, I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s refrain, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” After years of central-bank selling and a bear market in precious metals, the Financial Times recently declared the “Death of Gold.” But [...]
1Sep1998 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | Continued-
The Latest
Contraception: Insuring the Uninsurable
Update below. Controversy rages over the Obama administration’s mandate that all employers – including... Read More
The Snow Plowers’ Petition
The following might have happened in a small college town in upstate New York… In a cold and snowy... Read More
Super Bowl versus Education?
In the spirit of Super Bowl weekend I’d like to deconstruct a Facebook status update that a friend... Read More
Capitalism, Corporatism, and the Freed Market
When a front-running presidential contender tells the country that thanks to Barack Obama, “[w]e are... Read More
Creating Jobs versus Creating Value
Picking on New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is one of the largest participation sports on the Internet.... Read More
