Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Quick Note on Miss California and the Constitution

I am in a hotel room in North Dakota doing a radio interview for my book. (It’s on a commercial break.) I just wanted to blog this quickly before I forget. Did you hear Miss California’s statement at the press conference where Donald Trump said she could keep her crown? I don’t have time to […]

More Magical "Seasonal Adjustment" to the CPI

Hmm the headline says no CPI inflation in April. Yet as usual, prices did in fact rise, but they were seasonally adjusted away. According to the first sentence of the BLS press release: “The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.2 percent in April before seasonal adjustment, the Bureau of Labor Statistics […]

Scott Sumner on Krugman

I will be at the North Dakota Free Market Forum for the next few days, so blogging will be at a minimum. In the meantime, remember a while back when I said Scott Sumner was my new favorite blogger, and some of you pooh-poohed me because of his position on business cycles? You have to […]

The Fed as Crime Fighter?

In an otherwise interesting post regarding Fed officials’ sympathy for banks to engage in “regulatory capital arbitrage,” Arnold Kling writes: The thinking [by Fed officials] was that the Basel capital accords required banks to hold too much capital for mortgages (this was probably true). Accordingly, the article [by a Fed official] takes a sympathetic view […]

Austrian Business Cycle Theory and the "Rational Expectations" Objection

The most typical objection to the ABCT from mainstream economists is that it apparently violates “rational expectations.” Loosely: Why don’t businesspeople learn to be careful when the Fed lowers interest rates? Here [pdf] is an excerpt of a paper I wrote while teaching at Hillsdale. It has all the Bayesian bells and whistles, and gives […]

Busting the Myth of Green Jobs

The tech guy at IER managed to isolate my 6-minute intro at the Heritage Foundation’s recent panel on “green jobs.” I don’t take a stand here on the science; I merely point out that government constraints on business won’t make them more profitable (as Obama et al. are claiming).

Star Trek: Get Me to Sickbay, I’m Gonna Puke

I’m sorry kids, I was not happy with the latest Star Trek, and I was a massive Trek geek in junior high / first portion of high school. (Don’t ask me how many dates I had.) I think the TNG episode where LaForge accidentally has the Holodeck create Moriarity with his slip of the tongue […]

How Much Inflation Is the Market Forecasting?

The strongest argument against those of us who are warning of potentially massive price inflation is that the bond market is apparently disagreeing with us. For example, yields on 5-year Treasurys (as of this writing) are about as low as they have been in the series’ history at FRED, which certainly doesn’t seem consistent with […]