Mises Search

“Every change in the money relation alters the conditions of the individual members of society. Some become richer, some poorer.” – Mises, Human Action , p. 414. New money enters the economy at a particular point. It does not enter in the form of a proportional and simultaneous increase in everybody’s incomes. This means that there are uneven

The Economist, a disappointing magazine, has a fittingly disappointing list of “What to read to understand how economists think.” It’s one of their “evergreen” articles that they repost from time to time. It includes Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom , Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers , Dubner and Levitt’s Freakonomics , and two lesser-known

“The market economy involves peaceful cooperation. It bursts asunder when the citizens turn into warriors and, instead of exchanging commodities and services, fight one another.” So Ludwig von Mises begins a short chapter in Human Action called “The Economics of War.” While brief, the eleven pages (pages 817–28 in the scholar’s edition) are

When Silicon Valley Bank and other banks failed earlier this year, the debate over the sustainability of fractional reserve banking resurfaced. Under fractional reserve banking, banks keep only a fraction of customers’ deposits in reserve. The difference is bank credit, such as government debt, mortgages, business loans, and many other kinds of

The Federal Trade Commission has filed a lawsuit against Amazon, claiming that it wields monopoly power in online retail. According to the FTC, Amazon “is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power.” Here are some of the strategies included in the official complaint :

For some reason, the Fed continues to publish the Summary of Economic Projections (SEP), in which Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) members guess the trajectory of macroeconomic indicators like gross domestic product, the unemployment rate, and price inflation. They also take a stab at forecasting their own policy decisions over the next few

Bank stocks are still floundering after they took a major hit in March of this year, coinciding with the failures of Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic Bank, and Signature Bank. KRE, a regional banking ETF, is down 27 percent year-to-date, while KBE, an ETF with large banks, is down 16 percent year-to-date. Quarterly earnings will be reported by

Good News Paul Krugman has declared a “better-than-Goldilocks soft landing” due to (his favored) measures of price inflation reaching two percent and real GDP growing at 3.3 percent. Bad News Credit card delinquency has doubled since 2021. Regional bank stocks fell over 10% after Powell’s FOMC press conference. The civilian labor force has fallen

Many are questioning the Federal Reserve’s political independence lately. A reporter asked about it at the end of Chair Powell’s FOMC press conference , and it also came up in Powell’s 60 Minutes interview : PELLEY: Your decisions inevitably are going to have a bearing on this year’s election. And I wonder, to what degree does politics determine

Silvergate Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank fell like dominos in March–April 2023. The United States Treasury, Federal Reserve, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) intervened in an unprecedented way to stall the domino effect. They waived the FDIC’s $250,000 cap on insured deposits at the failed