Mises Search

A great piece of parody from the Cleveland Fed, sending up the Greenspan-Bush Voodoonomics II reprise. Very much in the vein of material written by former, Austrian-aware, President Jerry Jordan. (Read Here)  ’ And to think that there are still some ingrates who claim you have debased your currency, bankrupted your treasury, and impoverished your

The only man speaking any sense was once again our old friend Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed, who told an audience at the annual Asia Oil and Gas Conference in Kuala Lumpur : ‘Governments should once again control their currency and stabilise it. Then world trade would be less risky and would grow faster. With expanded world trade, the

As Reuters reports , the removal of the dead hand of government, coupled with falling prices, has allowed the long-suppressed entrepreneurs of Iraq to flourish! What a shame Citibank et al will soon be there to corrupt these efforts and that the US will soon re-impose its statist impediments to free exchange.What a shame, too, that we don’t take

Hitting the professional Bloomberg wires were the following quotes from Greenspan’s predecessor, the still-influential Paul Volcker, speaking at the LSE (no URL, I’m afraid. I’ll have to use the favourite line of our First Citizen, Antoine RobespiBlaire and say:’ C’mon! You have to...like.. trust me on this, guys.’)  `We have a record

We wrote in today’s Capital Letter  that, half a century ago, the US was subjected to the combination of an unbacked tax cut sponsored by the Republicans, the largest export subsidy in history – in the shape of that not-entirely altruistic exercise known as the Marshall Plan – and the explosion of an avowed policy of counter-insurgency and

‘Jesper Koll, from Merrill Lynch (Japan), told a Minerals Council of Australia conference that reports of the imminent collapse of the Japanese banking system were nonsense . ‘Mr Koll said because interest rates were zero, banks were infinitely wealthy to the point they could buy a country. “If Japan wanted to buy Australia, it could buy Australia

From Reuters via Forbes , Greenspan says: ‘The issue we are concerned about is not deflation in the sense of falling prices per se, but the issue of what I would call corrosive deflation. That is deflation that essentially feeds on itself, creates falling asset prices, which in turn brings down levels of economic activity through the wealth

At the end of the WSJ piece (June 4, 2003) by Dallas Fed President ‘Sideshow Bob’ McTeer , the man who once proudly likened the ’New Economy’ to a slowly boiling frog which would stealthily make us more prosperous, who called the Bubble simply ‘too much froth’ on an otherwise welcome glass of beer, and who exhorted Americans to repair the damage

An article in this week’s Economist neatly encapsulates much of what we Austrians in the UK have been trying to impress upon our readers and acquaintances: rampant government spending is producing negative returns, distorting the economy, and driving up costs - all of which are compounding the woes in the productive private sector. Citing an

A small excerpt from a recent piece  (Read Here)  on the latest US Flow of Funds report: ‘During the Bear Market, households have increased debt by $9.38 for every extra $1 of wage or proprietorial income earned – a degree of distress leverage 3.3 times worse than anything previously employed. ‘It has also meant that the sum of all private debt –