Janet Yellen was forced to wave a white flag this week, admitting what was long obvious — the Federal Reserve overestimated the strength of the global economy and will not be able to go through with its planned four rate hikes in 2016. As David Stockman noted in his take down of the FOMC announcement, “Listening to even a small portion of Simple Janet’s incoherent babble makes very clear that the nation’s central bank is well and truly impaled on its own petard.” Meanwhile, Ryan McMaken notes that diminishing foreign government holdings of US debt creates another issue for the Fed, possibly requiring the central bank to resume monetarizing public debt.
In the Fed’s desperation to hold off the pain that will come from the eventual popping of our current easy-money fueled bubbles, will Yellen start listening to the advice of her predecessor Ben Bernanke and embrace the absurdity of negative interest rates? We are already seeing the consequences of such policy play out in Switzerland and Germany and Japan.
At least the sight of Brazilians taking to the streets demanding Less Marx, More Mises can offer hope in our battle against the folly of “public policy.” As the ideas of Mises, Rothbard and the Austrian school continue to spread around the world, the closer we come to being able to achieve prosperity, freedom, and peace.
On the newest episode of Mises Weekends, Jeff joins Dennis Tubbergen of Everything Financial Radio to dive deeper into the bizarre world of negative interest rates.
And in case you missed any of them, here are this week’s featured Mises Daily articles and some of our most popular articles at Mises Wire:
- We Are Headed Toward a Cashless Society? by Thomas DiLorenzo
- Demagoguery vs. Data on Employment in America by Tyler Watts
- We Need the Pain that Comes with More Saving by C. Jay Engel
- Including the Ocean Floor, the Feds Own Much More Land than You Think by Mark Brandly
- To Oppose Free Trade Is To Embrace Violence by Ryan McMaken
- Switzerland: Negative Interest Rates Result in Rising Mortgage Rates by Paul-Martin Foss
- Hillary Clinton Wins the Federal Reserve Primary by Tho Bishop
- The “We’ve Created Millions of Jobs” Myth by Ryan McMaken
- Hope in Brazil as Millions March Against Rouseff by Tho Bishop
- Rothbard: The Progressive Movement by Murray Rothbard
- The Rage Against Wall Street Isn’t Just Anti-Capitalism by Ryan McMaken
- Fed Waves White Flag: “Foresees Fewer Rate Hikes” by Ryan McMaken
- Mises: The Fight Against Error by Ludwig von Mises
- “Who Will Pay for It?” is the Wrong Question To Ask Politicians by Matthew McCaffrey
- Impaled On Its Own Petard — The Fed’s Folly Festers Further by David Stockman
- Foreign Regimes Dumping US Debt — Will the Fed Just Monetize the Debt Instead? by Ryan McMaken
- Free Trade, and the US as “an Antiquated and Unnatural Construct” by Ryan McMaken
- Marc Faber: Some Misallocation Is Worse than Others by Ryan McMaken
- Against Public Policy by Jeff Deist
- German Response to Negative Interest Rates: Safe Deposit Boxes by Paul-Martin Foss
- A New Italian Translation of Human Action
- Mateusz Machaj on the Taylor Rule
- Salerno Reviews Grant’s The Forgotten Depression
