All Posts Tagged With: "monetary policy"
A Return to Gold?
“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. . . . Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society. . . .The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the [...]
30Nov2011 | and John L. Chapman | 13 comments | ContinuedMissing Samuel Tilden
If you’re under 50 you probably don’t remember when telephone “numbers” weren’t all numbers. From the 1920s until the mid-1960s most phone “numbers” began with two letters corresponding to certain digits on a common telephone dial. KL7-1234, for example, was read as “Klondike 7-1234.” My family’s number was TI3-8597. The letters were meant to honor [...]
26Oct2011 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | ContinuedA Simple Solution
There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong. —H. L. Mencken I have devised a simple plan for improving Americans’ health by drastically reducing everyone’s weight, thereby significantly increasing longevity and reducing medical costs. All we need to do is revalue the pound. Instead of a pound being [...]
24Aug2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 1 comment | ContinuedMoney and Inflation: What’s Going On in the World?
Are America and the world at risk for another inflationary episode similar to the 1970s and early 1980s? Or do current low rates of inflation portend low inflation for the foreseeable future? David Wessel revisited this question in his “Capital” column in the February 24, 2011, Wall Street Journal. He correctly stated that the Federal [...]
25May2011 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. | 6 comments | ContinuedQuantitative Uneasiness
In their recent paper, “Has the Fed Been a Failure?,” George A. Selgin, William D. Lastrapes, and Lawrence H. White conclude that over nearly 100 years the Federal Reserve’s performance has been mostly awful. Unfortunately, the Fed is currently engaged in a policy that will likely make a nice addition to their article. This policy, [...]
21Apr2011 | Ivan Pongracic Jr. | 36 comments | ContinuedA Simple Solution
By overriding market money prices we deny ourselves important data about the country’s fiscal health.
11Apr2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 3 comments | ContinuedGold and Money
Nothing seems to arouse passions—pro and con—quite like suggestions that gold should once again play a role in our money. “Only gold is money,” says one side. “It’s a barbarous relic,” says the other. Let’s turn down the heat a bit and look into some propositions about gold. That should lead us to some reasonable [...]
24Feb2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 23 comments | ContinuedThe Canard of “Underutilized Resources”
Last November the Federal Open Market Committee announced plans to purchase, by printing money, $600 billion of long-term government bonds over the next 6 months. This “quantitative easing,” Fed Chairman Bernanke assures us, is necessary to aid an economy that is suffering from “a very high level of underutilization of resources.” In other words, there’s [...]
24Feb2011 | Tyler Watts | 1 comment | ContinuedAnd the Slump Goes On
Official economic statistics and the underlying economic reality sometimes differ starkly. Such discrepancies may be almost inevitable when a small group of macroeconomic experts sets the official dates for peaks and troughs of aggregate economic activity. The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) recently “determined that a trough in [...]
24Feb2011 | Angel Martín Oro | 13 comments | ContinuedGetting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis and The Housing Boom and Bust
These two books are must-reads for anyone wanting to have a working understanding of the economic and financial crisis. They complement each other and together form a civics lesson for an informed electorate. Economists are prone to write turgid prose and employ a jargon-filled style. Not these two gems. Each author is a deservedly well-regarded [...]
22Sep2010 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. | 2 comments | ContinuedVienna and Chicago: Friends or Foes? A Tale of Two Schools of Free-Market Economics
In the post-World War II era, two of the leading voices for a return to a competitive free-market economy have been the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics. Both schools have influenced many people about how markets work and how government affects economic affairs. To many, the Austrian and Chicago economists seem to be saying [...]
13Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedSowing the Wind: Essays and Articles on Popular Economic Policies that Make Matters Worse
The world we live in today is a global economy. Entrepreneurs, traders, and investors are always searching for opportunities to better serve consumers. As a result, we are all interconnected. When the United States sneezes, so to speak, China, Argentina, or Mexico catches cold. In our economy of complex interrelationships, economic crises with wide-ranging consequences [...]
12Jul2010 | Bettina Bien Greaves | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Failure of Keynesian Economics
That anyone can still believe Keynes’s General Theory holds any answers to the world’s economic problems is one of those sad facts that make one realize just how difficult it is to gain headway in the dismal science. An article on John Maynard Keynes in the Washington Post late last year, which argued that “Keynes’s [...]
25Jun2010 | Steven Kates | 19 comments | ContinuedGovernment Must Stimulate to Avoid a 1937-Style Recession?
It is rather unfortunate that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Economics Prize Committee chose to award the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics to Paul Krugman. It is not that Krugman did not deserve the prize—his contributions to international trade theory were indeed substantive and valuable. The problem is that by 2008 Krugman had long [...]
24Mar2010 | Ivan Pongracic Jr. | 6 comments | ContinuedExit Strategies
As noted in the movie War Games, sometimes the only way to win a game is not to play. And sometimes the best exit strategy is not to enter in the first place.
3Dec2009 | Steven Horwitz | 2 comments | ContinuedStealth Expansion of Government Power
The government of the United States spent the year debating major new undertakings, ranging from health care to climate change to energy development to tax reform. Yet a far more fundamental shift, in the form of a rapid and pervasive expansion of government power over the private sector of the economy, has been going on [...]
23Oct2009 | Murray Weidenbaum | 1 comment | ContinuedWho's Watching the Fed? Not the Inspector General.
Scary stuff.
9Sep2009 | Mike Van Winkle | 0 comments | Continued-
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