It is not unusual to hear about the virtues of hard money and the evils of the paper variety at a gold conference. However, Austrian business cycle theory is rarely cited given the audience is only interested in hot stock tips. But at the Las Vegas Hard Assets investment conference held last week at Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, the Austrians were
With gold selling for around $1,400 per ounce, it seems like everyone has jumped on the yellow-metal bandwagon. Resource-investment guru Rick Rule said about gold investing recently , “we’re no longer lonely in the gold trade. You couldn’t describe this as a contrarian activity, and you couldn’t describe this as a low-risk activity.” But while
Anyone who has bought gold for the entirety of this bull market is always looking for signs of a top. Not to sell — one doesn’t get rid of their insurance — but just to wait until the insurance goes on sale. A price steadily holding over $1,400 per ounce (until the Japanese quake) has put gold on the cover of a few magazines, along with constant
Floyd Norris writes for the New York Times that it’s 1980 all over again. Discussion of gold has gone from nonexistent a decade ago to the question of whether its price is in bubble territory, and now a policy question in the Republican primary. Ron Paul has been stumping for a return to the gold standard for decades, and the populace has finally
With prices at the pump in the $4-per-gallon range, people are starting to think twice about taking those unnecessary trips. And it’s likely to get worse. “As the lack of supply growth and price-insulated non-OECD demand suggest a future rebound in U.S. gross domestic product growth or a major oil supply disruption could lead to $150 — $200 a
[This review originally appeared on LewRockwell.com.] Libertarians tend to be an intense lot. After all, with government making a mess of things economically and constantly infringing on our freedoms, what is there to laugh about? It’s a full-time job being outraged. Who has time for anything else? But the dictators and their apparatchiks come and
“The Congressman’s son may have heard his father at the dinner table, but he wasn’t listening.” When a junior high investment club wrote in to CNBC’s Squawk Box to ask legendary investor Warren Buffett what he thought the price of gold would be in five years and whether the yellow metal should be a part of value investing, the Oracle of Omaha
[An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Keith Hocker, is available for download .] In his extraordinary book Democracy: The God that Failed , Hans-Hermann Hoppe points out that the process of civilization is stopped when government continually violates property rights. The natural process of civilization comes through delaying
The writing side of the Liberty Watch crew recently convened for dinner and, of course, politics was the conversation of choice. Ron Paul supporters dominated the table. In fact, the expectant father is lobbying at home to name his newest after Ron. However his wife, the UNLV professor with child, announced that she is a John Edwards fan, and she
[This article originally appeared in Liberty Watch magazine .] Despite precious metals prices being on fire, attendance was light at the Hard Assets Investment Conference held Sept. 10 and 11 at Mandalay Bay. The usual graying and balding suspects were present, but, clearly, investing in commodities and natural resource mining stocks has not
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The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.