Mises Search

According to Bernanke there is good evidence that cash that goes to low- and moderate-income individuals is more likely to be spent in the near term -- hence, from this perspective, it is going to be beneficial for economic growth. Only if the amount of money in the economy increases, all other things being equal, spending in money terms will

The Federal Reserve is trying a range of new tricks to push new forms of lending as a means of preventing what they fear may otherwise be a major collapse in financial markets. What all these strategies have in common is an unwillingness to come to terms with the reality that the crisis is based on real factors and can’t be merely papered over

Frenchman Jean Tirole of the University of Toulouse won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for devising methods to improve regulation of industries dominated by a few large firms. According to Tirole, large firms undermine the efficient functioning of the market economy by being able to influence the prices and the quantity of products.

It is generally held that for an economist to be able to assess the state of the economy, he requires macroeconomic indicators which will tell him what is going on. The question that arises is this: why is it necessary to know about the state of the overall economy? What purpose can such types of information serve? Careful examination of these

A major problem with the mainstream framework of thinking is that people are presented as if a scale of preferences were hard-wired in their heads. Regardless of anything else this scale remains the same all the time. Valuations however, do not exist by themselves regardless of the things to be valued. On this Rothbard wrote, There can be no

Economists have always been envious of the practitioners of the natural and exact sciences. They have thought that introducing the methods of natural sciences such as a laboratory where experiments could be conducted could lead to a major breakthrough in our understanding of the world of economics. But while a laboratory is a valid way of doing

Some economists such as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman hold that during an economic slump it is the duty of the government to run large budget deficits in order to keep the economy going. On this score — given that from 2011 to 2014 the rate of growth of real gross domestic product (GDP) hovered at around 2 percent — many experts are of the view that

Most mainstream economists believe the application of quantitative methods on historical data can explain the state of the economy. Others such as Ludwig von Mises held that the data utilized by economists is a historical display, which by itself cannot provide the facts of economics. Ludwig von Mises wrote , “Experience of economic history is

The majority of economists view deflation as a general decline in prices of goods and services. This is viewed as a major threat to the public’s well-being for deflation is seen as a major factor that plunges the economy into an economic depression. Most of them are of the view that central banks and governments’ worldwide must aggressively fight

The GDP framework and the output gap is an abstraction that does little more than provide justification for the interventions of  government officials. According to popular thinking, the key cause behind either inflation or deflation is the difference, or the gap, between what an economy is producing and its potential output. Potential output is