Thomas Mayer is the chief economist of Deutsche Bank Group and head of Deutsche Bank Research. He has an impressive background as a highly placed analyst in major private and public financial institutions. Which is to say, when he speaks, people are much more likely to pay attention and to give weight to what he says than...
Read More »

The Sunday Boston Globe has an interesting profile of Ken Rogoff, whose views I respect, despite many disagreements. His recent call for a burst of “moderate” inflation to reduce the debt overhang has gotten a lot of play in the press. I don’t favor the idea, but at least Rogoff acknowledges, not only the...
Read More »

In response to my recent essay “Obama and Hoover: Two ‘Smart’ (Stupid) Presidents”, one commenter did me the service of rehashing the old myths about the 1920s and the causes of the depression and how Herbert Hoover did little, FDR did a lot and Hoover has nothing in common with “Wonder Boy” Obama. (Coolidge...
Read More »

Coverage of the recent financial crisis has been rife with errors of fact and interpretation. Crisis Economics, by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm, belongs in a special category. The book weaves together underappreciated truths and common falsehoods and does so in ways that relatively few scholars can easily untangle, as Independent Institute Research Fellow...
Read More »

As Dave Barry used to say, I’m not making this up. Deeply mired in the fatally flawed myth that World War II ended the Great Depression, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman yesterday proposed that an invasion by space aliens would well provide the economic stimulus this country needs: As Dr. Robert Higgs has more than...
Read More »

Highly-regarded J.P. Morgan Global FX Strategist Ken Landon included the following in his email advisory on Tuesday: Here’s a tautology: it will no doubt be another volatile day. With confidence having been severely undermined over the past two weeks, risk markets will continue to be susceptible to bouts of extreme fear in both directions....
Read More »

A colleague sent me a link to the following collection of Hayek interviews, now available online. Other useful sites include: http://miltonfriedman.blogspot.com/ http://www.missliberty.com/ – updates to Miss Liberty’s Guide to Film and Video http://www.youtube.com/user/independentinstitute http://www.cato.org/events/archive.html http://reason.tv/ William F. Buckley, Jr.’s Firing Line show included interviews with people across the political spectrum, now collected at the Hoover...
Read More »

Of capitalism’s condemned features, perhaps leftists complain most of all about the profits, seemingly growing without relent, accumulated in the hands of an established corporate elite. The rich get rich and the poor get poorer. Putting aside the second part of the last sentence, the concept of the rich getting richer is especially striking....
Read More »

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is troubled by the unemployment rate that has crept back upwards, and the “frustratingly slow” economic recovery. And so what does he propose? More of the same, of course. More liquidity and a base interest rate kept near zero. You see, this is practically the only tool he has: monetary...
Read More »

This summer, the Independent Institute is excited to host “The Challenge of Liberty”, two student seminar programs, one geared toward college students and the other for high school students. The high school session runs from June 20 to 24 at our offices in Oakland and the college program will be held at a Bay...
Read More »