Most people have heard about statistics or polls that report on the state of the American consumer and something called “consumer confidence,” but few know what they are or what they mean or even recall what the latest reports reveal. You might have also heard that Keynesian Paul Krugman had claimed that such statistics were biased against
You probably haven’t even noticed the Great Chocolate Crisis of 2024 , but it is real and some of us are very concerned! The wholesale price of cocoa, which comes from the cocoa bean, is the main ingredient in chocolate and has skyrocketed in price! When the Spanish Conquistadors came across cocoa 500 years ago it was use by the Aztecs of Mexico
For this week’s episode, I wanted to find something familiar in the form of a “saying” to try and convey my thoughts about the economy as it stands today. I even thought about nursery rhymes like “ring around the Rosie” and “musical chairs,” but those did not exactly fit and did not stand up to historical or logical scrutiny the way I hoped. I
This is a transcript from Mark Thornton’s Podcast , “Minor Issues,” July 6. Well, I know that many of my listeners will have a certain number of regrets about the July 4th holiday. And some of them may not even celebrate it at all. I certainly share many of those regrets. And concerns about the future of our country. We have an extremely bad
The price of copper has hit an all-time high. This represents a signal about the world economy. The euphemism on Wall Street for the implications of the price of copper is called Doctor Copper. If the price of copper is moving higher, then Doctor Copper is diagnosing economic growth, or possibly an artificial economic boom. If the price of copper
Marijuana, i.e., cannabis, is now legal in eleven states for recreational use, thirty-three states for medical purposes, and another sixteen states have decriminalized it (usually fines for possession of small amounts). The upcoming election will see several legalization ballot measures, including recreational use legalization in Arizona, Montana,
With the world moving more and more in the direction of trade protectionism and war, it is worth remembering the origin of the fallacies upon which this movement is based. Michel Montaigne, the sixteenth-century minor politician and writer, is credited with the illogical view that trade and exchange result in one person winning and the other
This month, Portugal celebrates fourteen years of drug decriminalization. The grand experiment is now considered a happy success considering it was adopted out of desperation and in the face of dire warnings from proponents of the global drug war. What Led to Decriminalization During the mid-twentieth century, Portugal experienced fifty years of
In a recent article I advocated for a new way of naming business cycles. The new approach emphasizes the cause rather than the effect. So instead of the “housing bubble” and “financial crisis,” we should refer to the Greenspan-Bernanke Crisis. Here we will turn our attention to the current situation. The current economy is a puzzle for mainstream
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.
