Booms and Busts

Roger Garrison’s long-awaited book compares and contrasts Austrian business cycle theory with a number of other approaches, 

The media’s favorite phony solution to the economic downturn is for the Fed to drop interest rates lower and lower until the economy registers an upturn. What is wrong with this approach?

Next to government debt in terms of liquidity is the swollen market for residential mortgages. As author Charles Morris observed in his book, Money, Greed, and Risk, "Measured by volume, the second most important American financial instrument over the past half century, by a wide margin, has been the lowly residential mortgage.

For a decade, calls for easy money and cheap credit were subdued. But now that hard times are upon us again, guess what? Martin Masse explains.

Pundits often blame tight money for economic downturns. But what about the loose money policies that created the unsustainable boom in the first place? John Cochran explains.

President Bush stands accused of using his supposedly superhuman powers to drive us into recession. William Anderson wonders whether he will also be accused of casting spells to bring down the Dow.

There is no “new economy” any more than the “New Economics” of the 1960s had solved the problems of the business cycle, as its promoters had claimed. Bill Anderson explains why.

What causes an economic downturn? The business press keeps getting it painfully wrong, writes Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Real "credit crunch" is threatening on the horizon, writes Hans Sennholz, and it could gravely encumber the American economy.

Cheer up. A drop in stock prices doesn't destroy wealth, say Robert Murphy and Gene Callahan. It only reveals a change in the marketability of one line of production against another.