The Cultural Consequences of Negative Interest Rates
Negative interest rates are now entrenched reality in Europe, and not just for buyers of sovereign or corporate debt – even retail savings accounts are affected. What does this mean for …
Mises Wire
Anti-Market Conservatives Want to Fix Social Ills, But Their Cure Will Only Make Things Worse
Marco Rubio is the latest public figure to join the burgeoning anti-liberal and anti-market movement masquerading itself as being defending “the common good” from the greedy claws of the rapacious …
Per Bylund on the Economics of Value versus Economies of Scale
Good economic theory predicts effective, cutting edge business practices. For example, the dynamic flexibility of capital resource allocation predicted by Austrian Capital Theory is being realized today via digitization, dematerialization …
A Chance to Match Your Gift
Gary Schlarbaum, one of our generous supporters, has again offered to match all donations received through December 9. That means your $10 donation becomes $20, your $25 donation becomes $50, …
How Banks Go Bust
[The Case Against the Fed, Chapter 8, “Problems for the Fractional-Reserve Banker: Insolvency.” (Slightly edited for publication as a separate article.)] The fractional-reserve banker, even if he violates his …
Rationality in the Real World Isn’t What Economists Think It Is
Behavioral economists say that people behave irrationally because they miscalculate the probability. But maybe it is not a problem with people, but with the use of the probability theory in …
Exports: Currency Devaluation Won’t Grow the Economy
A visible weakness in economic activity in major world economies raises concern among various commentators that world economies have difficulties recovering despite very aggressive loose monetary policies. The yearly growth …
The Boom Is Worse than the Bust
[This article is excerpted from chapter 20 of Human Action: The Scholar’s Edition.] The popularity of inflation and credit expansion, the ultimate source of the repeated attempts to render people …
Central Bankers Have Declared War on Your Savings
When any one of the plethora of bubbles burst – pick your poison – and the next financial crisis impacts Wall Street and Main Street, how will the central banks …
Some Fundamental Differences between Ludwig von Mises and Nassim Taleb
In my previous post we saw some of the areas where Taleb’s writing is strikingly Misesian: the hidden value and emergent properties of spontaneous orders, the insightfully realistic view of …