Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Did Abandoning the Gold Standard Get Us Out of the Depression?

Greg Mankiw has come out of his shell lately on his blog. Whenever I visited in the past, I would quickly move on because he would offer links with at most a sentence of commentary. Unfortunately, now he is devoting his writing skills to pushing the benefits of massive inflation. Last week Mankiw wrote an […]

Scott Sumner Restores My Faith in Economists

Wow. I am totally blown away by Scott Sumner’s blog, The Money Illusion. He is a Chicago PhD who specializes in the gold standard and the Great Depression. I don’t even necessarily agree with his overall views, but WOW his posts are really really good. It’s what I would have expected from nerdy academic economists […]

Will New Fed "Tools" Avert Hyperinflation?

My sources say no. An excerpt: For a different idea, economists Woodward and Hall think the Fed just needs the ability to charge banks for holding reserves….How does this avert the threat of hyperinflation? Simple, according to Woodward and Hall. If banks ever start loaning out too much of their (now massive) excess reserves, and […]

Private Law and the Somalis

Dick Clark the Younger has an interesting article that he adapted from an actual law school assignment. An excerpt: Because I recognize that government courts serve primarily to advance the interests of government power, my goals as an aspiring attorney are to use what I can from my legal education to work against the State—to […]

The Real Lessons of the Great Depression

Since late 2007, more and more commentators have drawn parallels between our current financial crisis and the Great Depression. Nobel laureates and presidential advisors [pdf] confidently proclaim that it was Herbert Hoover’s laissez-faire penny pinching that exacerbated the Depression, and that the American economy was saved only when FDR boldly ran up enormous deficits to […]

Why Did Texas Skirt the Housing Crash?

Von Pepe sends me this interesting analysis of the relatively moderate boom/bust in Texas house prices. The analyst thinks the answer is that Texas law prohibits prepayment penalties. In other words, homeowners in Texas were allowed to pay down their mortgages ahead of schedule, without being penalized by the lender. He concludes: I also want […]

Worst Job in the World: White House Press Secretary

This is hilarious. I heard this on the radio and had to share it. I only could stand the first 80 seconds or so, but make sure you listen for the male reporter who jumps in. Seriously, I understand why politicians lie–it’s good to be the king. But what’s in it for the press secretary? […]

Government Report: "Oops We Aren’t Good With Taxpayer Money"

According to CNBC: In a 250-page quarterly report to Congress, TARP’s special inspector general concludes that a private-public partnership designed to rid financial institutions of their “toxic assets” is tilted in favor of private investors and creates “potential unfairness to the taxpayer.” In related news, the National Academy of Sciences released a report saying that […]