Category: Economic Theory
The analysis published under this category are as follows.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Trade Cycle Impact on the Market Economy / Economics / Economic Theory
By: MISES
The popularity of inflation and credit expansion, the ultimate source of the repeated attempts to render people prosperous by credit expansion, and thus the cause of the cyclical fluctuations of business, manifests itself clearly in the customary terminology. The boom is called good business, prosperity, and upswing. Its unavoidable aftermath, the readjustment of conditions to the real data of the market, is called crisis, slump, bad business, depression. People rebel against the insight that the disturbing element is to be seen in the malinvestment and the overconsumption of the boom period and that such an artificially induced boom is doomed. They are looking for the philosophers' stone to make it last.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
The Crisis of Capitalism; Why the Socialists are Wrong / Politics / Economic Theory
By: David_Knox_Barker
Clearly international free market capitalism is the midst of the greatest long wave debt crisis in history; including government, corporate and personal debt. Overcapacity plagues virtually every industry around the globe from Taipei to Toledo to Timbuktu. Debt, overcapacity, and their impact on market prices are the key long wave winter season trends that have yet to run their course. The world now faces the final years of this long wave decline and winter season that will deliver global economic and financial upheaval until 2012.
Friday, June 11, 2010
The Monetary or Circulation-Credit Theory of the Trade Cycle / Economics / Economic Theory
By: MISES
The theory of the cyclical fluctuations of business as elaborated by the British Currency School was in two respects unsatisfactory.
First, it failed to recognize that circulation credit can be granted not only by the issue of banknotes in excess of the banks' holding of cash reserves, but also by creating bank deposits subject to check in excess of such reserves (checkbook money, deposit currency). Consequently it did not realize that deposits payable on demand can also be used as a device of credit expansion. This error is of little weight, as it can be easily amended. It is enough to stress the point that all that refers to credit expansion is valid for all varieties of credit expansion no matter whether the additional fiduciary media are banknotes or deposits.
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Friday, June 04, 2010
A Primer on Austrian Economics / Economics / Economic Theory
By: J_M_Finegold_Catalan
The jurisdiction of economics extends far beyond the study of production and consumption of goods and services. The science of economics consists of the study of human action, interaction, and cooperation. Even if you accept the mainstream division of micro- and macroeconomics, at the most basic levels economics deals with how market agents make decisions and how these decisions affect interactions between individuals. Even the broadest of market trends, usually condemned to the realm of "macroeconomics," boils down to interactions between individual market agents.[1]
Friday, June 04, 2010
Give Free Markets a Chance / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Paul_L_Kasriel
After watching The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission's June 2nd hearing on credit rating agencies yesterday and reading Professor Raghuram Rajan's op-ed piece, (Bankers have been sold short by market distortions) in the June 3rd edition of the FT, I felt moved to rerun a commentary I wrote way back on July 17, 2008.
Given the economic and financial market "challenges" of the past year, some pundits and politicians are concluding that these challenges are the result of the failure of free markets. I would respond that we cannot determine whether free markets have failed unless we have had free markets. I do not think we have.
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Monday, May 31, 2010
The Kondratiev Cycle: Where Are We Now? / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Jim_Richter
In one of the early issues of my newsletter, I wrote an article about the Kondratiev Cycle, an economic cycle which was first identified by Nikolai D. Kondratiev (1892-1938) an eminent Russian economist. The famous economist, Joseph Schumpeter, once said that the Kondratiev Wave is “...the single most important tool in economic forecasting.”
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
What is the Underground Economy? / Economics / Economic Theory
By: MISES
Danny LeRoy writes: What is the underground economy?
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Sunday, May 23, 2010
Revisionist History: Violation of Economic Laws, Why You've Never Heard of the Great Depression of 1920 / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Submissions
Lets take a look at what happens when economic laws are violated. Revisionist history is a useful, potent tool. The cats out of the bag and everyone knows Obama is a closet socialist, but lets take a look at a American favorite, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Despite all his spending programs, public works, quick fix legislations, radio talks, etc., it solved nothing. Years after his programs were in full swing even his Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau admitted, "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work ... After eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... And an enormous debt to boot!". To wit - at least back then a high government official payed lip service to the truth.
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Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Rationality and the Free Market Economy / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Douglas_French
People seem to do the craziest things when it comes to money. Whether it's chasing stock-market bubbles or paying good money after bad on a home that's hopelessly underwater, the idea of individuals acting as homo economicus seems far-fetched. Only in the ivory-tower world of rational-expectations theory does one find perfectly rational humans making judgments using all available information to satisfy their subjective ends.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
HyperInflation or HyperDeflation? The Quantity Theory of Money / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Professor_Emeritus
James Turk's article Hyperinflation Looms dated April 20, 2010, is based on Quantity Theory of Money (QTM). It draws an analogy between Weimar Germany of 1923 and the United States of 2010. Both precepts are invalid. As far as the QTM is concerned, it suffices to point to the very fact, admitted by Turk, that it is possible to have a shortage of money simultaneously with the overworking of the printing presses. Hyperinflation is not the same as the ultimate inflation of the money supply. It is the ultimate depreciation of the currency unit. The two concepts are far from being the same, QTM notwithstanding.
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
It Is Not the Aggregate Demand, Stupid! / Economics / Economic Theory
By: MISES
Jeremie T.A. Rostan writes: According to Obama's leading economic adviser, the current double-digit unemployment rate is obviously due to a "shortfall in aggregate demand." Indeed, former UC Berkeley professor Christina Romer even told the Wall Street Journal that, until her chief of staff advised her not to, she intended to title a recent speech "It's Aggregate Demand, Stupid."[1]
Monday, May 03, 2010
Why Economic Policies Inspired by the Great Depression Fail / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Gerard_Jackson
The latest quarterly survey by the National Association for Business Economics reports that the stimulus did not promote recovery. (In case you didn't know, the country's phony media are frantically pushing the idea that happy days are on the way, something they would never do under a Republican administration.) Any conundrum here is a direct result of fallacious economic reasoning. The idea that the level of output and employment is a function of aggregate spending was a very old fallacy that Keynes successfully resurrected and which is now part of orthodox economic theory even though it has been thoroughly refuted by experience.
Saturday, May 01, 2010
Economics: How to Cure a Sick Discipline / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Ian_Fletcher
America’s financial mess and our festering trade crisis were both caused by bad policies that mainstream economics told us were OK. This has made the public cynical about economists, but has produced few specific suggestions on how to actually fix the discipline. So—what should we do to restore its ability to give sound advice?
Friday, April 30, 2010
The Phenomenon of Interest / Interest-Rates / Economic Theory
By: MISES
It has been shown that time preference is a category inherent in every human action. Time preference manifests itself in the phenomenon of originary interest, i.e., the discount of future goods as against present goods.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Economics Is Crucial for Ethics / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Art_Carden
I assume that we all want to use the lives we've been given to make the world a better place. This isn't as straightforward as it seems at first. It is insufficient merely to think globally; and depressingly many kinds of acting locally are positively destructive. I have been asked to consider a handful of questions: I'm supposed to discuss the most pressing issue in the world, whether it is getting better or worse, and what we can do about it. I have also been asked what we can do to reduce infant mortality in Memphis. Finally, I've been asked what "thinking globally and acting locally" means to me. I will discuss each in turn.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Economic Booms and Busts, the Punditry's Terrible Grasp of Economics / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Gerard_Jackson
What makes manufacturing an important part of the boom-bust phenomenon is the crucial role that time plays in production. Unfortunately, not only is this fact ignored by our economic commentariat they also adamantly refuse to even recognise its existence, just as they refuse to recognise that there exists a capital structure. (What makes this attitude peculiar is that some of these people claim to have studied von Hayek. The content of their articles strongly suggests otherwise.)
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Uncle Sam, Global Trade Sucker? / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Ian_Fletcher
Of all the blurbs I got for my book Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why, my favorite is one I got from Robert B. Cassidy, a distinguished former trade diplomat whose career included being Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for China, Asia and the Pacific. His contribution was short, but it made a point, coming from a man who had actually sat at the table where many of America’s key trade agreements were negotiated, that our government would do well to grasp. He wrote,
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Yes, Virginia, There is a Legitimate Case Against Free Trade / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Ian_Fletcher
THERE IS A MYTH in wide circulation that the superiority of free trade is simply a settled question on which all serious economists agree. The flip side of this myth, of course, is that anyone who criticizes free trade must either be ignorant of economics, or the spokesman of some special interest which hopes to benefit from trade restrictions. Such critics are not only wrong, the story continues with admittedly impeccable logic, but profoundly worthy of public contempt, as they are necessarily either dumb or corrupt.Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, April 12, 2010
Why UK Treasury Economic Models are Out of Date, and Wrong / Economics / Economic Theory
By: John_Cardy
I had a superb session on Budget Day last month with Joe Nellis, Professor of Economics at Cranfield, and he gave us some of his forecasts for economy in the next few years. The forecast could be summarized as that we would recover, but slowly.
It was interesting to see later, during the budget, the Treasury forecasts and compare, and as the papers have said today, 'Expert' forecasters think Darling is a bit optimistic.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Common Sense Beats Keynesian Sense / Economics / Economic Theory
By: MISES
L. Albert Hahn writes: My book, The Economics of Illusion, published in 1949, was essentially a critique of the late Lord Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. My conclusion was, briefly, that what is new in Keynes's work is not good, and what is good is not new.