Mises Search

On February 1, 2001, the day after the Federal Open Market Committee (hereafter, FOMC) cut the target Fed funds rate by ½ percentage point, The Wall Street Journal published a front-page article under the headline “Psychology Test: Latest Fed Rate Cut Combats a Contagion of Low Confidence.”  The opening sentence reads: “With yesterday’s half-point

While assorted financial journalists, market pundits, policy wonks, Fed governors and even mainstream macroeconomists have been thrown into a panic by the slight whiff of price deflation they detected in the last few months in the U.S. economy, they have almost completely ignored  the wrenching confiscatory deflation that is now going on in

The Analyst , published by the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India ( ICFAI ), interviewed Joseph T. Salerno, editor of the  Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics , concerning the financial and banking chaos in Argentina: Q : Are proposed reforms enough to justify having the IMF lend a helping hand to Argentina? SALERNO : To begin

Ludwig von Mises once wrote: “The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority.”   Hans Sennholz, professor emeritus at Grove City College, is one of a handful of

On April 22, 2003, President Bush declared in response to a reporter’s question, “I think Alan Greenspan should get another term.”  Bush’s expression of support for Greenspan’s reappointment to another four-year term as Fed Chairman came more than a year in advance of the expiration of the Chairman’s current term in June 2004. Even if he

Although there are deep and abiding differences between Chicago school monetarists and Austrian monetary theorists, there has always been strong agreement among them on one thing: the central importance of the money supply in explaining the purchasing power of money or “price level” in the economy. This does not appear to be the case any longer. 

Recent events such as the “deflationary boom” in China have led a few mainstream macroeconomists to re-examine and revise their views on the phenomenon of deflation, conventionally defined as a general and persistent decline in prices. The long-held view that a general fall in prices, or increase in the value of money, whatever its origin spells

Should economics be pursued as a profession or a vocation? Below I argue that this choice of subjective orientation is enormously important, and tends to dictate whether an economist will serve the cause of truth and freedom, or waste his or her talents on convenience, ephemera, and statism. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary  gives one

There exists today in Anglo-American economics a veritable “conspiracy of silence” regarding the works and achievements of the French Liberal School of Economics. This is at once a sad commentary on the state of disinterested historical scholarship in the economics profession and a resounding confirmation of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific

Introduction The Situation in France The Situation in Great Britain The Situation in the United States The Representation of the French Liberal School in the English-Language Literature Conclusion Notes   Frédéric Bastiat was a member of the French liberal school, which thoroughly dominated economics in France from the beginning of the nineteenth