The Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture. Recorded March 9, 2012, at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. Includes an introduction by Joseph T. Salerno. Audio version of this lecture includes a Question and Answer period.
The richest and most successful Keynesian on Wall St has summarized his current policy advice succinctly. The Fed should monetize all kinds of debt in order to keep the nominal economic growth rate north of the nominal interest rate. In this way, necessary deleveraging can take place gradually and less painfully. This policy of course won’t work.
Bernanke says that the new announced round of money printing ( QE3 plus more Twist)) is intended to reduce unemployment. Does he believe that? It is possible that Bernanke really drinks his own Cool Aid, but I doubt it. Does he think that stock market gains will boost confidence and somehow help employment indirectly? Perhaps. He has in the past
Do you recall the courtroom classic in which the prosecutor says to the person in the box: “Just yes or no please, have you or have you not stopped beating your wife?” Yes of course means that you were beating her. No means you are still beating her. Debaters and politicians know that if you can control the terms of the debate, you will have won
We now have the announcement that Ben Bernanke’s Fed will buy $45 billion a month in treasuries, QE4, until unemployment reaches 6.5% or his version of inflation exceeds 2.5%. What a surprise! Last September, when Bernanke announced the third phase of the government’s program of borrowing from itself by creating new money and using it to buy
In his current Bloomberg piece ( link below). Keynes’s biographer Robert Skidelsky tells us that the famous economist’s “notion of satiety” has been buried by the “Darwinian capitalism” unleashed by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980′s, with its “ideological faith in the market system” and glorification of “untrammeled self-interest” as expressed
“Yet how can there be better protection for A and B, if S must tax them in order to provide it? Is there not a contradiction within the very construction of S as an expropriating property protector? In fact, is this not exactly what is also--and more appropriately—referred to as a protection racket? To be sure, S will make peace between A and
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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.