Are Expectations the Driving Force Behind Business Cycles?
Even if business people learn to expect easy-money caused bubbles and busts — this would still not prevent the formation of a boom-bust cycle.
Even if business people learn to expect easy-money caused bubbles and busts — this would still not prevent the formation of a boom-bust cycle.
Inflation can always give only a temporary fillip to the economy, and will leave us with a legacy of postponed adjustments and new maladjustments which make our problem more difficult.
The “boom-bust” cycle is generated by monetary intervention in the market, specifically bank credit expansion to business.
Creative design of statistics cannot solve the persistent crisis. The core of the problem lies in a misguided economic policy that zombifies the Japanese economy and thus undermines prosperity.
Where there is no business at all, business can be neither good nor bad. There may be starvation, and famine, but no depression in the sense in which this term is used in dealing with the problems of a market economy.
The world now has the impossible choice of permanently reduced productivity and slower economic growth — or the mass bankruptcy of a significant percentage of the economy.
Can credit expansion in one part of the world infect a laissez-faire economy with a boom-bust cycle? Block, Engelhardt, and Herbener argue that the laissez-faire economy is largely sheltered.