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Longtime readers know that I am not the biggest fan of Paul Krugman, especially when it comes to his advocacy of government inflation and budget deficits. It’s especially ironic when I criticize Krugman’s writing on international trade, since that’s the area in which he won the Nobel Prize. But here we go again, as Krugman’s recent New York Times

The government’s latest report puts the twelve-month official consumer price inflation rate at 8.5 percent, the highest since December 1981: As economists debate the causes of, and cure for, this price inflation, it’s worth recounting which schools of thought saw it coming. Although individuals can be nuanced, generally speaking the Austrians have

Review of Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis Scott Patterson New York: Scribner, 2023; 293 pages Scott Patterson has delivered an unusual book. At least to this reader, it produced the same effect as watching a Black Mirror episode where you think you know where the story is heading, then suddenly all of

The unipolar dominance of the American Empire has allowed it to command an outsized share of the world’s resources in exchange for green pieces of paper. That dominance, and the dollar’s hegemony, nears its end. Since the end of World War II, the United States dollar has enjoyed the special status of global reserve currency. Coupled with the

Austrian economics is superior to Marxism in every respect, and this includes internal, sectarian squabbles. When we Austrians feel the time is ripe for another bloodletting — it keeps us strong by thinning the herd once in a while — we argue over fractional-reserve banking. If you have never had the pleasure of watching such fireworks, I point

When discussing financial matters, people often conflate money with wealth . Although such loose language may be perfectly fine in everyday conversation, it’s important to occasionally go over the basics and make sure we are thinking about these issues in the proper way. In this article, I use a recent National Public Radio interview in order to

At the Mises Academy we are just wrapping up the inaugural class , on the Austrian theory of the business cycle. During the class, one issue that came up repeatedly was whether the Mises/Hayek story of the trade cycle could occur on a completely free market, using gold as money and a banking system that operated on 100 percent reserves. As any

  At times I am amazed that the general public hasn’t rounded up all of us economists and thrown us over Niagara Falls. Forget complicated and technical issues like the business cycle — we economists can’t even agree on whether Social Security is broke. Recently Dean Baker and our old friend Paul Krugman claimed with exasperation that only a liar

Harvard professor Edward Glaeser recently wrote a New York Times blog post entitled “ The Economics of Libertarianism, Revealed .” From what I’ve already told you about the piece, you should suspect that it’s not exactly cutting-edge analysis. In this article I’ll walk through Glaeser’s critical observations, most of which misfire. Opening With a

In a recent blog post , UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong made an arithmetic case that, “We need bigger deficits now!” As an Austrian economist I naturally find his conclusion horribly mistaken, but it will still be useful to go through DeLong’s argument and identify exactly where he goes astray. “Normal” Economic Arithmetic To his credit, DeLong