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Advocates of aggressive government intervention in the name of fighting climate change have posed as the defenders of “consensus science,” labeling any who dissent from their agenda as “deniers” with all of the baggage that term entails. And yet, as I’ve been pointing out for years, the peer-reviewed economics literature does  not  support the

The Fed met market expectations by cutting its target for the fed funds rate by 25 basis points, down to the range of 1.75 - 2.00 percent. In this post I want to demonstrate just how boxed in the Fed has now become, with the help of 3 charts. First, let’s review just how low interest rates have been (and still are), in a long-term historical

[This article is part of the  Understanding Money Mechanics  series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in 2021.] This chapter will provide a brief sketch of the historical context in which the Federal Reserve was founded, summarize some of the major changes to the Fed’s institutional structure and mandate over the years,

[This article is part of the Understanding Money Mechanics series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in late 2020.] This chapter will provide a brief sketch of the historical context in which the Federal Reserve was founded, summarize some of the major changes to the Fed’s institutional structure and mandate over the

As part of the simmering war on the rich that is a central component of the progressive left’s campaign for 2020, Robert Reich recently wrote a blog post in which he argued that there were “basically only five ways to accumulate a billion dollars, and none of them has to do with being successful in free market capitalism.” I’ll go through the

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. The latest report on new unemployment claims  was abysmal, coming in at 4.4 million last week, some 100,000 more than surveyed economists had expected. The continuous claims came in at just under 16 million, an all-time record. Mainstream labor economists estimate that, all things considered,

As an Austrian economist, I’ve known for years that Keynesian economics rests on crude fallacies—indeed, Tom Woods and I have an entire podcast dedicated to the (usually wrong) columns of Paul Krugman. But in the arguments over the coronavirus, we see that the Keynesian commentary isn’t just wrong, but dangerous. Specifically, Neil Irwin, the

    The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy Stephanie Kelton New York: PublicAffairs, 2020 336 pp. Robert P. Murphy (bobmurphy@mises.com) is a senior fellow at the Mises Institute. I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that Stephanie Kelton—economics professor at Stony Brook and advisor to the

[Review of Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy (New York: PublicAffairs, 2020).]   Listen to  the  Audio Mises Wire  version  of this book review. I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that Stephanie Kelton—economics professor at Stony Brook and advisor to the 2016 Bernie

Editor’s Note: We keep hearing from the Fed’s defenders that the current spate of new stimulus and bailouts from the central bank are really not a big deal and are all very prudent and moderate. I asked Senior Fellow Bob Murphy to provide some much needed perspective. Ryan McMaken: We’re in a very odd situation right now in terms of evaluating the