Booms and Busts

"Naïve trust in the power of words to command reality is found in all mass delusions."

"Market prices can get screwed up when the Fed tinkers with interest rates. Because of the distorted price signals, the actual real resources are invested improperly."

All that stimulatory policies can do is redistribute real savings from wealth-productive to nonproductive activities."

Maybe letting the market fix what government broke isn't an option they can bring themselves to embrace, even if it's the only way out.

But prosperity can't be printed. Government edicts won't magically make us better off. Their fatal conceit will only lead us to disaster.

Presented by Congressman Ron Paul at “The Failure of the Keynesian State,” the Mises Circle in Houston, sponsored by Jeremy S. Davis.

Presented by Douglas E. French at “The Failure of the Keynesian State,” the Mises Circle in Houston, sponsored by Jeremy S. Davis.

Haiti's government and other governments need to get out of the way and not make a market-based recovery process more difficult than it has to be.

When interest rates drop, entrepreneurs have no reliable way to tell whether, and to what extent, the drop is caused by (A) true increases in the ongoing flow of investable resources or by (B) what amounts to a temporary series of one-time transfers of wealth into the loan market. With such Fed-imposed blindness to the true data of the market, businesses across the whole economy are bound to make malinvestments.

The Industrial Revolution and the development of the modern banking system were the two big things that happened in the Eighteenth Century in Britain. Why does the boom-bust cycle emerge? Is the cycle just a natural part of industry, or is it caused by the banking system?