This weekend, I had the pleasure to be a guest on the radio program Financial Myth Busting with Dawn J. Bennett. We discussed the inability or unwillingness of politicians and economists alike to learn from past mistakes, and the consequences
Keynesianism
Keynes was a failure in Japan – No need to embrace him in Europe
Reprinted from DetlevSchlichter.com Draghi’s volte-face two weeks ago has emboldened the Keynesian majority in the media and in economic research departments. It has injected new life into their relentless campaign for yet more state intervention in the Eurozone economy. It
Mathematical Economics vs. “Literary” Economics?
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Famed Chicago economist John Cochrane has recently returned from a seminar at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER, the organization tasked with determining whether the economy is in a recession or not, and where Ludwig von Mises was employed
War for Prosperity
Economist Tyler Cowen always has an interesting view on things. He eschews the Austrian, deductive school in favor of a more data-driven approach. But he has sympathies for the heterodox view, and his own politics are described as generally libertarian.
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Why is There So Much Confusion in Macroeconomics?
Should we print, not print? Stimulate, not stimulate? Is austerity the right or wrong policy? Is government spending or printing effective? If we ask two economists these questions, we will likely get three opinions for each question. Economists seem confused,
DS joins Mises Canada
Interest in the Austrian School of Economics and the work of Ludwig von Mises has been on the rise for some time, and happily, this trend seems to be continuing, as can be seen, among other things, from the spread
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What Was “The Coyne Affair” ?
James Elliott Coyne would have been 104 years old this July, if he had lived past the ripe old age of 102. A lawyer by training, Coyne first joined the Bank of Canada in 1938 in the Research Department, but
The Failure of Keynesianism
It’s hard not to agree with the old aphorism “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” It’s nice to think we learn from our mistakes; yet we always seem to repeat them at some later date. Reading the daily
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The Street Keynesians
Reprinted from Taki’s Magazine According to a poll carried out by the Figaro newspaper, only 17% of the French believe that 2014 will be a good year, but in fact it started very well for France. Only 1,064 cars were burned by
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The Mess the Bank Made… and Denies
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
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Regime Uncertainty and the Fallacy of Aggregate Demand
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
Economic Fallacies and the Fight for Liberty
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
Why Not Another World War?
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
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On The Existential Threat of Krugmanomics
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
Jonathan Kay and the Foolishness of the Paradox of Thrift
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
Quebec’s Brownshirts
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
The Keynesian Fallacy
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
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Trees, Meet the Forest
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
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Cat’s Out Of The Bag On EZ Solution
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
Brazil Changes Measure To Underscore Inflation (Print More)
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
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