Mark Thornton: Is the Bust Here?

Tags: Booms and Busts, The Fed, U.S. Economy

02/09/2018 Mark Thornton Jeff Deist

With stock markets in turmoil earlier this week, the Mises Institute’s resident expert on booms and busts joins Jeff Deist to make sense of it. Will new Fed Chair Jerome Powell do everything possible to prop up markets, or will he be more hawkish than Janet Yellen? What kinds of indicators does Mark look for to predict trouble (hint: it’s not the VIX). Why does the volume of margin loans matter, and why is the Russell 2000 Index a better predictor than the Dow or Nasdaq? Are cryptocurrencies now bound up with macro trends? And is Austrian business cycle theory necessarily incomplete as a tool to help investors?

See Mark Thornton’s 2004 article “Housing: Too Good to be True”.

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