Back in April, I reviewed a document called the “Financial System Reviewâ€, published semi-annually by the Bank of Canada. Due to the dire warnings contained therein, I thought it necessary to produce a more user-friendly summary of the information the
In a recent New York Times column, economist Paul Krugman once again took to chastising a claim he has infamously dubbed  the “confidence fairy.â€Â According to the Nobel laureate, the “confidence fairy†is the erroneous belief that ambiguity over future
It’s easy to be pessimistic over the future prospects of liberty when major industrialized nations around the world are becoming increasingly rife with market intervention, police aggression, and fallacious economic reasoning. The laissez faire ideal of a society where people
Reprinted from EuroPac.net There is overwhelming agreement among economists that the Second World War was responsible for decisively ending the Great Depression. When asked why the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are failing to make the same impact today, they
Bad ideas need a lot of marketing to make their sale possible. Good ideas, on the other hand, sell themselves. In economic terms bad ideas lead to ruin; while good ones are simply the discovery of a natural law of
There is no question that the Keynesian paradigm is beginning to lose influence. Years after the financial crisis and the implementation of massive bouts of government-financed stimulus, the world economy has yet to recover. The Keynesian prescription to our ills
During the rise of nearly every socialist/fascist regime, one of the ingredients has always been the formation of paramilitary, thuggish organizations that carry out the dirty work of the political leaders. This is necessary to silence dissent and intimidate voters
Unfortunately, this theory is still dominant in 99% of the economics departments. This is what we learn when we enrolled to get a degree in economics. Deficits don’t matter; government spending will win the day, etc. It is taught that
Are we witnessing the end of a mercantilist, Keynesian financial system? Gustave Flaubert said “The future is the worst thing about the present.” Gustave would have made a wonderful central banker. Who can read this and not feel that it
When push comes to shove, never doubt the central banker’s decisiveness to fall back on what he/she knows best. Business Insider has finally cracked the code on the implications of last week’s decision by the ECB to both cut interest
Via Bloomberg Businessweek (h/t Redmond Weissenberger) A change in the way Brazil gauges inflation will help the central bank near its targets, enabling it to keep cutting interest rates, said Guilherme Figueiredo, hedge fund director at M. Safra & Co.Figueiredo’s
The Fed’s latest inflationary scheme sounds like a technocratic innovation. It lowered the costs of currency swaps between central banks of the world, with the idea that the Fed would do for the globe what Europe, England and China are
Color me a shade of unsurprised blue. Financial heavy weight and big government buddy George Soros is out with another plan to save the EU. Rather than rely on the forced but subtle nationalization of undercapitalized banks by euro governments,
A recent statement by David Frum has been making the rounds on the internet recently that should give everyone pause: Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Wall Street Journal editorial page between 2000 and 2011, and someone in
We have all heard the claim that government spending can “kick-start†the economy when it falters. For example, governments all over the world introduced a steady stream of stimulus packages that were intended to compensate for the effects of the
I received an e-mail last week from my economics department stating that an alumni who works at the Bank of Canada was coming to the university to lead a private conference about employment opportunities at the Bank. For an
The Federal Reserve announced yesterday that they will engage in a policy called “the twist” – meaning they will sell some of their short-term US treasury holdings in exchange for long-term US treasuries. This is said to be neutral to
Just a few hours ago, the European Central Bank announced “in coordination with the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and the Swiss National Bank, to conduct three US dollar liquidity-providing operations with a maturity of
The Losses from the German Inflation Far Exceeded Any Gains Originally Published in the Freeman – November 2003 • Volume: 53 • Issue: 10 Paper money inflation and credit expansion never fall upon a people like an act of God.
Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published in The Freeman, May 1972, Volume 22, Issue 1. It has been reprinted with permission. Ever since President Nixon suspended gold payments, on August 15, 1971, the question of realistic par values of the world’s
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