Mises Search

Last week a student in my MBA-level intermediate-macro seminar raised a provocative question. We were discussing the various kinds of (price) deflation and which kinds, according to Austrians, are benign and accommodate consumer preferences, and which are malignant and conflict with consumer preferences. In view of the Austrian emphasis on

William H. Hutt’s outstanding accomplishment is his pathbreaking reconstruction of the macroeconomic analysis of price and resource allocation, the long-established core of neoclassical economics. He demonstrates its indisputable and abiding relevance to the macroeconomic problems of inflation, unemployment, and depression. In the course of this

When the first Austrian Scholars Conference was held in 1992, we were at the very beginning of the Great Bubble Economy, brought to you by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke and their associates at the Fed. This shiny, bubbly “new economy” has finally gone the way of all bubble economies in history, deflating into stale dishwater and swirling slowly

Several recent blog posts indicate that the modern supporters of “free banking” continue to misconstrue the fundamental theoretical challenge posed by their critics. The main question is not about the ethical-legal issue of whether or not fractional-reserve banking is “fraud” under all circumstances. Nor, ultimately, is it even about

Three weeks ago I read the news that a 24.78 carat “fancy intense pink” diamond sold for $46,158,674 at an auction held by Sotheby’s in Geneva, Switzerland. The winning bid for “The Graff Pink,” as it was named immediately after its purchase by London jeweler Laurence Graff, was the highest price ever recorded for a jewel at auction and more than

I vividly recall the event that set me on a long and winding road to libertarianism and Austrian economics. I was 12 years old and my parents, who were both first-generation Italian-Americans, were hosting some of my mother’s relatives, including a distant male cousin who had traveled from Italy to visit relatives residing in Rhode Island and New

This essay originally appeared as the introduction to History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II . “Rothbard’s approach to monetary history does not focus on measurement but on motives.” In this volume, Murray Rothbard has given us a comprehensive history of money and banking in the United States, from

Under cover of its multiplicity of fabricated wars on drugs, terror, tax evasion, and organized crime, the US government has long been waging a hidden war on cash. One symptom of the war is that the largest denomination of US currency is the $100 note, whose ever-eroding purchasing power is far below the purchasing power of the €500 note. US

Leland Yeager offers an illuminating discussion of a serious problem that has historically plagued monetary theory and continues to do so to this day: the failure to clearly distinguish between the individual and the overall viewpoints when analyzing monetary phenomena. I wish to emphasize particularly Yeager’s insight that the source of this

[This is a revised version of written testimony submitted to the the Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology of the Committee on Financial Services, US House of Representatives, “Fractional Reserve Banking and Central Banking as Sources of Economic Instability: The Sound Money Alternative,” June 28, 2012.] Chairman Paul and members