All Posts Tagged With: "interest rates"
Bootleggers, Baptists, and Bailed-Out Bankers
For more than a year now, people worldwide have experienced an extraordinary chain of economic events. Led by crushing increases in U.S. mortgage-related bankruptcies, the world financial collapse that followed has been termed the subprime crisis, the financial meltdown, the Wall Street bailout, the beginning of another Great Depression, and even the end of capitalism [...]
2Mar2009 | Bruce Yandle | 6 comments | ContinuedOn the Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle, Part I
One of the most vivid memories of my undergraduate years is of sitting for hours in my carrel in the old Polk Library at Nicholls State University and reading F.A. Hayek’s Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle and his Prices and Production. These books on the economic cycles of booms and busts are among the [...]
20Jan2009 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 5 comments | ContinuedThe Fed Should Inflate to End the Financial Crisis?
The current housing and financial crisis has many people blaming “greed and market forces” for unleashing a panoply of evils on the unsuspecting middle class. This has led to many bad proposals to solve the crisis, such as the April 14 Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Inflation Solution to the Housing Mess” by John Makin, [...]
1Jul2008 | Ivan Pongracic Jr. | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Fed Didn’t Bail Out Wall Street?
In his New York Times column (“It’s Monetary Policy, Not a Morality Play,” September 9, 2007), Tyler Cowen decried the clichéd pattern of casting all financial stories into “simple moral narratives.” Although many commentators have questioned the Fed’s handling of the credit crunch last August and September, Cowen sees no hanky-panky: Talk of a bailout [...]
1Jan2008 | Robert P. Murphy | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Euro versus Currency Competition
It is now four years since the euro was introduced as a circulating currency in parts of the European Union. Both Europeans and others are becoming increasingly used to a single money in much of the continent. If the euro remains in use for another five or ten years people may well look back at [...]
1Jan2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Fed’s Potent Power
The Federal Reserve holds the fate of the U.S. economy in its hands. Or that’s the conclusion many observers draw when they watch investors react wildly to the most minute details of the Fed’s policy statements. This conclusion is at once exaggerated and accurate. It’s exaggerated because, at bottom, the Fed controls only the supply [...]
1Jan2007 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 1 comment | ContinuedMonetary-Policy Disasters of the Twentieth Century
Kirby R. Cundiff is an associate professor of finance at Northeastern State University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an adjunct associate professor of finance at the University of Maryland University College. The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913 and soon did what central banks almost always do: it started printing lots of money. During World [...]
1Jan2007 | Kirby R. Cundiff | 5 comments | ContinuedSmart Economics: Commonsense Answers to 50 Questions about Government, Taxes, Business, and Households
By Michael L. Walden Reviewed by George C. Leef
1Jan2007 | George C. Leef | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Greenspan Fed in Perspective
Some readers of the Wall Street Journal might have been led to believe that Alan Greenspan had somehow followed Milton Friedman’s monetary rule. We now see, though, that there was no well-grounded rule; there was no standard.
1Jun2006 | Roger W. Garrison | 1 comment | ContinuedWhy Not Monetary Freedom?
In all of the commentaries that have appeared since President George W. Bush nominated Dr. Ben S. Bernanke as Alan Greenspan
1Dec2005 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedInterest Rates and the Federal Reserve
Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. His latest book is Austrian Economics and the Political Economy of Freedom (Elgar). On June 30, 2004, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee announced it was raising the targeted federal funds interest rate from 1 to 1.25 percent, to begin to prevent a possible future price inflation. The [...]
1Sep2004 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Awesome Powers of Government
Government possesses far more mechanisms that influence actions in the private sector than most people realize. The typical business firm faces an impressive array of government powers. Government as Paymaster. The oldest policy tool available to government is to hire people and put them on its payroll. Government employees represent such diverse professions as teachers, [...]
1Mar2004 | Murray Weidenbaum | 79 comments | ContinuedDeficits Do Matter
Hans Sennholz served as president of the Foundation for Economic Education from 1992 to 1997. At the time of his retirement, FEE’s Board of Trustees honored him with the title president emeritus. He was chairman of the department of economics at Grove City College for many years. This article is reprinted from the December 1986 [...]
1Mar2004 | Hans F. Sennholz | 8 comments | ContinuedNinety Years of Monetary Central Planning in the United States
Ninety years ago this month, on December 23, 1913, the Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, establishing a national central-banking system in the United States. The governing board of the Federal Reserve was organized on August 12, 1914, and the Federal Reserve banks opened for operation on November 16, 1914. On the surface, the preamble [...]
1Dec2003 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedIf Alan Greenspan Lived In Huntsville, Alabama!
I wish Alan Greenspan lived here. That way he’d know that there’s a Huntsville, Alabama, grocery chain selling chicken leg quarters for 29 cents a pound. That ain’t exactly a sign of inflation. Consequently, the next time the Federal Reserve Board met: Mr. Greenspan and his pals wouldn’t touch the button marked “mash to raise [...]
1Aug2002 | Ted Roberts | 0 comments | ContinuedA Classic Hayekian Hangover
Roger Garrison is professor of economics at Auburn University and author of Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure (Routledge, 2001); Gene Callahan is author of Economics for Real People (Ludwig von Mises Institute, forthcoming). Do busts follow investment booms as hangovers follow drinking binges? Dubbing the idea “The Hangover Theory” (Slate, December 3, [...]
1Jan2002 | and Roger W. Garrison | 0 comments | ContinuedKnut Wicksell: A Sesquicentennial Appreciation
Richard Ebeling is the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics and chairman of the economics department at Hillsdale College. In the early months of 1889 a 37-year-old Swedish student named Knut Wicksell was walking through the streets of Berlin in Germany when he happened to notice in the window of a bookstore a recently published [...]
1Dec2001 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued-
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