Austrian School

Archive for Austrian School

Did Hayek Favor Targeting NGDP?

I think I may have blogged about this before, but hey, if I can’t quite remember, maybe you guys can’t either. (Plus, there could be new readers.) Sometimes I see people claiming that Hayek supported NGDP targeting, or perhaps that Hayek’s preferred monetary regime would mimic NGDP targeting. I am by no means a Hayek […]

Hayek Would Be 117 Years Young (Yesterday)

My article in the American Thinker. An excerpt: This emphasis on dispersed knowledge was one of Hayek’s key contributions to the debate over socialism during the 1930s. Specifically, Hayek argued that one of the key functions of private property and market prices was to allow individuals to communicate information to each other in an economical […]

Inverted Yield Curve and Recessions

The 3-month and 1-year Treasury yields have gone way up in the past year, but the overall spread (say between them and the 10-year) is still quite positive, so the classic warning of an impending recession is still not here. Here’s a long-term chart: In the chart above, the red line is the 10-year yield, […]

Monetary Policy Views Applied to a Thermostat

If you’re trying to understand why I made this post, all I can say is that Scott Sumner went down this road. You wanna get nuts!? Come on! Let’s get nuts! * * * The curtain rises, showing six nerds in a house, all shivering and breath visibly coming out of their nostrils. BEN: While […]

I Was Writing About the Natural Rate of Interest Before It Was Cool

As Free Advice readers know, I have had my differences with Scott Sumner. But in a recent exchange he told me: “I’d encourage you to brush up on the Wicksellian theory of interest rates, it might help you to better understand my argument.” More generally, it seems that all the cool bloggers are talking about […]

Mises and the Market

My article at The Daily Caller explains how the Austrian perspective prepared many analysts for the recent market volatility.

Tom DiLorenzo: “How I Came To Austrian Economics”

This was the opening lecture for Mises University. (I’m in Auburn, AL all week for this flagship event of the Mises Institute.) Starting around the 12:00 mark Tom pays a nice compliment to David Friedman.

Tom Woods and I Talk About Krugman and Keynesianism

It’s all here… BTW in the interview I implied that the tradition of explaining business cycles as due to purely real factors (as opposed to monetary) is centered in Chicago, but actually I think it’s more nuanced than that. (In contrast, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis is definitely associated with Chicago.)