On Friday the House is expected to vote on the Waxman-Markey climate change and energy bill, which contains an aggressive cap-and-trade program. Critics have pointed out that it could impose serious harms on the U.S. economy with little environmental benefit. The CBO entered the fray [.pdf] recently and announced that by 2020, the annual cost to
Over at LRC, Michael Rozeff has a surprising analysis where he lays out a few convincing arguments that gold prices are too high right now, relative to other prices. He concludes that gold is “overvalued” and that its downward trend may very well continue. I won’t quibble with his numerical arguments, but I think they are at best irrelevant.
In December, the Fed hiked its target for the federal funds rate, which is the interest rate banks charge each other for overnight loans of reserves. Since 2008 the Fed’s target for the Fed Funds Rate had been a range of 0 percent – 0.25 percent (or what is referred to as zero to 25 “basis points”). But last month they moved that target range up
In Tom Woods’ Meltdown , he chides conservatives who try to blame the housing bubble solely on the Community Reinvestment Act and other such particular interventions. Woods argues that only the Federal Reserve could explain the general booms (and hence busts) in market economies, and that without the Fed’s easy policies after the dot-com crash,
I have been out of academia and working for think tanks for a while now, and so I may have a better ear for the changing climate than those of you still grading papers. “Real people” are a lot more receptive to thinking hard about economic issues lately, for obvious reasons. To give a concrete example, the op ed below (sorry for self-promo)
I don’t believe Krugman saw Judge Napolitano’s invitation , but he at least is grappling with specific (and modern-day) proponents of Austrian business cycle theory. There is a definite imbalance in the comments if any of you want to chime in. (And remember, they don’t like naughty words at the
Incidentally, I realized after the initial reaction to this that a lot of the younger anti-Keynesians wouldn’t recognize the song. (Not that I’m that old myself–but my dad was a big “oldies” fan so I’m quite familiar with ’60s rock.) The actual song is The Buckinghams’
One of the most important concepts in economic theory is the quantity of money. However, when going from theory to practical application, things get messy. In the real world, it’s not obvious how to count up the amount of “money” in the economy at any given time. Because of this ambiguity, economists have developed several different “monetary
One of the popular objections to the GOP proposals to reform health insurance markets is that the Affordable Care Act (aka “ObamaCare”) saved thousands of lives per year, and hence that tinkering with ObamaCare will literally kill lots of people. For example, Hillary Clinton tweeted out: Now to be sure, even if the claim were true, it still
Recently Senator Ted Cruz aggressively questioned Janet Yellen on the Fed’s possible role in causing the financial crisis and subsequent recession. In particular, he claimed that “in the summer of 2008” the Fed “told markets that it was shifting to a tighter monetary policy,” and that this announcement “set off a scramble for cash, which caused
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.
