Booms and Busts

Is there any merit to the popular definition of recession? Why must it be two quarters of negative growth and not one, or perhaps three? Frank Shostak gives another view and assesses the prospects for recovery.

Government is far from the economy's savior.  Rather, it is a parasite, a cancer, that eats away at the wealth of its citizens with its fiat currency, its many billions of dollars of expropriated wealth, and its multitudinous directives.

While not quite Keynesian pyramids or payments to farmers to plow up their surplus crops, this is still, sadly, yet another New Deal in the making.

It is conceivable that stocks might have come back after September 11. But the meddlers in DC seemed to be doing everything in their power to drive it down and out.

Whatever direction the stock market may take in the future, its opening day was a time for honest assessment of how the recent terrorist attacks and their aftermath may affect our economic future. 

Forbes magazine's Peter Brimelow and Edwin Rubenstein ask, "Does Hayek’s Law condemn the U.S. economy to a Japanese-like L-shaped recession?" John Cochran responds.

The Fed-fueled boom in Web commerce turned to bust, but that says nothing about the merit of the medium, writes Lew Rockwell.

It is the inevitable consequence of Fed interest-rate manipulations to disturb, disrupt, and disarrange economic activity, writes Hans Sennholz.

Everyone seems to agree that the printing press will forestall recession—everyone, that is, except the Austrians. Sean Corrigan explains why new money confers no social benefit.

It is sad that, even though Keynesian economics has been discredited time and again, we still hear the pundits declare that consumers cause recessions- and prosperity- simply by choosing to spend or not to spend. The "heroic consumer" who spends and spends in the face of adversity needs to be put to rest.