All Posts Tagged With: "monetary policy"
Stealth 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 | 0 comments | ContinuedCapital Letters
Is Greenspan Really Innocent of Causing the Housing Boom?
David Henderson and Jeff Hummel have written a remarkably pro-Greenspan article, “Was Money Really Easy Under Greenspan?” (www.tinyurl.com/cuf3ug). The authors overlooked several points that would undermine their portrayal of Fed chairman Alan Greenspan as an anti-inflationist and the best Fed chairman ever. (Better than Paul Volcker?) To [...]
Government Sets Us Up for the Next Bust
If an athlete injures himself and suffers great pain, we recognize the shortsightedness of giving him painkillers to keep him going. The pain might be masked, but at the risk of greater injury later.
That’s a good analogy for the inflationary policies now pursued by Washington. These policies may temporarily “stimulate the economy,” but they also [...]
News Flash: FDR Didn’t Restore Prosperity!
The New Deal did not end the Great Depression. This statement will come as no shock to Freeman readers, but it will to the many people who have never encountered it before. Now people are encountering it—in newspaper columns and news-talk shows.
Why, after years of being taught that Franklin Roosevelt’s economic intervention saved the country [...]
Greenspan Should Be Shocked by Risky Lending?
Toward the end of his tenure as Fed chairman in early 2006, Alan Greenspan was the object of praise edging at times into adulation. It came from some unlikely sources. Milton Friedman penned an encomium for Greenspan in the pages of the Wall Street Journal titled, “The Greenspan Story: He Has Set a Standard.” After [...]
2Mar2009 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedWas Money Really Easy Under Greenspan?
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has become everyone’s favorite scapegoat. His policies allegedly caused, or at least contributed to, the current financial crisis. He is attacked from the left for lax financial regulation, from the right for loose monetary policy, and from the middle for both. Yet two years ago, on leaving office, Greenspan [...]
2Mar2009 | David R Henderson and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel | 6 comments | ContinuedWhy “Inflation” Is Back
“Government,” observed the renowned Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, “is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper, and make it worthless by applying ink.”
Mises was describing the curse of inflation, the process whereby government expands a nation’s money supply and thereby erodes the value of each monetary unit—dollar, peso, pound, franc, [...]
Inflation 101: Cause Versus Transmission
Howard Baetjer, Jr. is a lecturer in economics at Towson University.
It’s always a pleasure for a teacher to receive a note from a former student showing that he or she has taken key lessons to heart. I had such a pleasure last winter when Joey, who had taken Money and Banking with me last fall, [...]
The Recurring Crisis
Recently the governor of the Bank of England announced that the “nice” times had come to an end. (In the Bank’s lexicon, NICE = “Non-Inflationary Constant Expansion”). This news will not come as any shock to the many Americans who have had their homes repossessed recently, but it does appear to have startled many of [...]
1Jul2008 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Fed Should Inflate to End the Financial Crisis? It Just Ain’t So!
Ivan Pongracic, Jr. teaches economics at Hillsdale College.
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 [...]
The 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 a [...]
The Times that Tried Men’s Economic Souls
Two hundred and thirty years ago this month in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, the brutal and storied winter of 1777–78 came to a long-awaited close. Nearly a quarter of George Washington’s Continental Army troops encamped there had died—victims of hunger, exposure, and disease. Almost every American knows that much, but few can tell you why Congress [...]
1Mar2008 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Fed Didn’t Bail Out Wall Street? It Just Ain’t So!
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 is [...]
Capital Letters
David Hume and Reason
In the very title of his article in The Freeman of October 2007, Frank van Dun asks, “Can We Be Free If Reason Is the Slave of the Passions?” His article is uncommonly long and gauzy for a Freeman piece; and his citations to David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature are few [...]
Capital Letters
Thanks to Milton Friedman’s brilliance, charisma, and diplomacy he became an ardent spokesman for many free-market reforms in this country. And now Ivan Pongracic, Jr. (“The Great Depression According to Milton Friedman,” September 2007) gives him credit for accomplishing what seems miraculous—convincing Fed officials that the Fed itself was responsible for precipitating the crash and [...]
1Dec2007 | agardner | 0 comments | ContinuedSubprime Monetary Policy
Gerald O’Driscoll is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and was formerly vice president and economic adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The comments of Brian Wesbury, William Long, and Maralene Martin are gratefully acknowledged. Parts of this article appeared in the author’s August 10 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Our Subprime Fed.”
In [...]
Something Besides Money Growth Causes Inflation? It Just Ain’t So!
Howard Baetjer, Jr. is a lecturer in economics at Towson University.
Some economic phenomena can result from a variety of causes. A temporary increase in unemployment, for example, might be caused by a sudden, disruptive change in production technology, or in trade patterns, or in labor or tax laws; or it could be caused by natural [...]
-
Latest Toon
-
Book Reviews
-
The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
