The recent blowup of GameStop shares has revealed, if anyone was still doubting, that the center of clown world is not Washington, DC, nor Silicon Valley—but Wall Street. To be clear, this is not meant to refer to the gallant band of redditors from r/wallstreetbets—those few, those happy few, that band of brothers who, as of this writing, may very
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. One of the first things that the student of economics is liable to be tortured with when he turns to monetary theory is the equation of exchange. Based on a mechanistic understanding of the quantity theory of money, the equation purports to show the relation between the supply of money
The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking Saifedean Ammous Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2018 xviii + 286 pp. Abstract: Treating bitcoin from the point of view of Austrian economics, Saifedean Ammous’ The Bitcoin Standard relates bitcoin to the theory of the market economy as a whole. Bitcoin is not necessarily
Introduction There has been a lot of talk about central bank digital currency (CBDC) recently, as central bankers around the world are discussing the possibility of launching their own CBDCs. Some of the problems of CBDCs have been pointed out already (see, e.g., here and here ), and I will not discuss them too much here. The purpose of the
From time to time, Austrian economists, goldbugs, and other economists on the saner end of the spectrum warn of the inflationary dangers of modern central bank policies. The most famous case of this was Bob Murphy’s bet with David Henderson that the Federal Reserve’s policies after the financial crisis of 2008 would result in high, i.e., double
Ludwig von Mises was called several names and epithets in his life, by his admirers and enemies alike. His friends and colleagues dubbed him the “Last Knight of Liberalism,” while his critics called him intransigent, fanatic, and even less flattering epithets. Just recently I came across another nickname the great Austrian had in the 1920s and
Introduction Historical events are complex phenomena, and monocausal explanations are therefore by definition wrong when explaining history. Many factors go into explaining why people and the world’s governments reacted as they did to the coronavirus. It is, however, my contention that examining the inflationary policies pursued by central banks
Twenty twenty is a year dominated by bad news. While governments around the world have imposed extremely destructive restrictions on economic life and promise a “Great Reset” that amounts to a great leap forward into the socialist future, central bankers have advanced plans for implementing central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). These may arrive
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.
