Knut 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 [...]

America’s Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard

Ludwig von Mises Institute · 2000 · 368 pages · $29.00 Reviewed by Roger W. Garrison It may not be conventional to review the fifth edition of a book that appears several years after its author’s passing. But America’s Great Depression is not a conventional book. It is written with verve and aplomb. And its [...]

Economics on Trial

In today’s robust global economy, the wheat represents genuine prosperity—the new products, technologies, and productivity generated by capitalists and entrepreneurs. It represents real economic growth and when harvested, reflects a true higher standard of living for everyone. Under such conditions, stock prices are likely to rise.

The Hayek-Keynes Debate: Lessons for Current Business Cycle Research by John P. Cochran and Fred R. Glahe

Edwin Mellen Press • 1999 • 200 pages • $89.95 Unlike some, this book’s title accurately reveals the theme and goal of the text. The authors have set for themselves an admirable task. In a book of only about 200 pages they review the debates that occurred during the 1930s between F. A. Hayek and [...]

New Possibilities for Our Grandchildren

Today’s economists don’t appear to be as optimistic as Keynes, even as we enter another year of a dynamic, full-employment economy. I asked several well-known economists for recommendations that would give us sustained (long-term, not short-term) economic growth rates of 6, 7, or maybe even 10 percent a year, eventually fulfilling Keynes’s economic nirvana.

A 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 [...]

The Central Banks

Mr. French is a vice president in commercial real estate lending for a bank in Las Vegas, Nevada. Believing that America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, has almighty power over interest rates and, in turn, the well-being of the country’s economy, the financial press constantly focuses its attention on the actions of the Fed. Fed [...]

Another Shocking Reversal in Macroeconomics

Who wrote this? “Fiscal policy is no longer a major tool of stabilization policy in the United States. Over the foreseeable future, stabilization policy will be performed by Federal Reserve monetary policy.”

Milton Friedman? No, it was not a monetarist.

I recently met with Milton Friedman in his home in San Francisco, and asked him who he thought wrote the above statement. “Alan Greenspan?” he queried. No, it wasn’t a Federal Reserve official.

The U.S. Banking Debacle of the 1980s: A Lesson in Government Mismanagement

Dr. Kaufman is the John Smith Professor of Banking and Finance at Loyola University of Chicago, and is Co-Chair of the Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee. This paper is a shortened version of a longer paper presented at the International Conference on Bad Enterprise Debts in Central and Eastern Europe in Budapest, Hungary on June 6-8, [...]