The Fed

Like the Greenspan Fed before it, the Yellen Fed has doubled down on easy money, but will trigger a crisis once it tries to inch toward more normal interest rates.

As an exciting year comes to a close, we want to thank all of our incredible members that allow us to do the work we do in advancing Austrian economics, freedom, and peace.

Former Mises Fellow and current economics professor Mateusz Machaj discusses free market reforms in Poland, central banking, and the lack of Polish appetite for joining the eurozone.

Even when a boom is obvious, it is still in the interests of individual owners and consumers to keep it going.

Whatever the Fed imagines they can control and whatever their real intentions are, a central authority cannot optimally set prices that are in line with people’s preferences. This is especially important for interest rates, which have far-reaching influence throughout the economy.

In a recent exchange with Janet Yellen, Senator Ted Cruz blamed the Fed for being too "tight" with monetary policy, thus causing the financial crisis of 2008. Cruz is right that the Fed was at fault, but he's wrong about how.

ZIRP has created massive asset bubbles throughout the world economy, but also has a diabolical impact on ordinary people who are largely disconnected to the bubbles.

The world waits to see if next week is finally the week that the Fed announces its rate hike. Can the economy survive whatever small bump the Fed deals out? Perhaps, but that won’t change the inherent instability of our current monetary regime.

Central bankers would have us believe that creating money “out of thin air” is no problem as long as the “demand for money” increases. They also claim that gold-backed money is more prone to booms and busts. But they’re wrong on both counts.

Opponents of austerity have come out to denounce the idea that it’s bad for governments to borrow. They note that there are benefits to borrowing. The distinction they fail to make is that there’s a big difference between private borrowing and government borrowing.