Booms and Busts

Austrian school capital theory and business-cycle theory are the best I have found.

We suggest that decades of reckless monetary policies by the Fed have severely depleted the pool of real savings.

Presented to the Auburn University Economics Club, Auburn, Alabama, on 14 October 2008.

Interviewed on American Vigilance Coast to Coast with Blake and Mike, 12 October 2008.

Many laboring in the thriving cottage industry of Hayek biographers, critics and interpreters have commented on the transition from a "Hayek I" to a "Hayek II" that began in the late 1930s, portraying it as almost wholly an intellectual re-orientation and change in research interests. Few, if any, have recognized the radical alteration in analytical procedure and rhetorical style that characterized this transformation.

It was credit expansion and the attempt to keep prices high that prolonged the Depression, which would otherwise have ended by 1931 or 1932. On this point Bernanke is all wet.

At the root of the problem are not mortgage-backed assets as such but the Fed's boom-bust policies.

As long as governments and central banks continue to focus on the monetary symptoms of the "secondary depression" and continue to ignore the structural aspects of the "primary depression," they act like quacks.

From “Choice in Currency: A Path to Sound Money”; the Mises Circle in Vancouver. Recorded 13 September 2008.

If we want to avoid the next great depression, all such government interventions should cease.