Category: Economic Theory
The analysis published under this category are as follows.Thursday, March 04, 2010
Elliott Wave Principle Crash Course: There's No Going Back / InvestorEducation / Economic Theory
Wave Principle Crash Course: There's No Going BackFree video tutorial available to all Club EWI members
By Nico Isaac
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Sunday, February 28, 2010
Cause of Today's Economic Crises: Too Much Thrift / Economics / Economic Theory
In this essay I want to propose that the ultimate of cause of today's economic crises is that we have too much thrift. This view is very similar to John Maynard Keynes' Paradox of Thrift. What I want to show is that this is not a paradox at all but confusion about what saving money really means and what consequences it has. I want to explain this confusion by way of examples and using non-technical economic jargon usually used by Keynesian economists. But before I can go into why too much savings leads to a disaster in the modern economy I need to clarify what I mean by savings and what money is by way of an example:
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Thursday, February 25, 2010
Inflation as the Enemy of Investing / Economics / Economic Theory
In this age of inflation, we are all forced to do many tasks that others could do better for us. The fact is that inflation impedes the process of civilization, which is brought about by the division of labor. While, without the central bank's continual monetary infusions, prices would gently fall as technology made all things and all people more efficient, we don't enjoy that luxury. Instead we're mowing our own grass, fixing the flappers in our toilet tanks, and managing our own retirement funds.
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Sunday, February 21, 2010
Government Stopping the Cleansing Action of Capitalism By Propping Up Malinvestments / Economics / Economic Theory
The business end of the business cycle does the dirty work of clearing away the malinvestments made during the previous boom. These malinvestments are a stark reminder of what was hot and now is not.
Cheap and abundant money flowed into real-estate projects after the tech bubble burst and the Fed hit the monetary gas. Sand states like Arizona, California, and Florida, as well as the hub of the Southeast, Atlanta, attracted homebuilders large and small.
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Friday, February 19, 2010
Note to Fareed Zakaria: Tax Rates Affect Behavior / Economics / Economic Theory
Fareed Zakaria is not a fiscal conservative by any means. His left leaning bias towards relying on tax increases to fix our deficits, instead of spending cuts, makes that abundantly clear. On his “What in the World” segment on Sunday’s GPS program, Mr. Zakaria excoriated former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan for not asserting that they want taxes to increase in order to balance the budget--Zakaria’s comment was prompted from an interview those gentlemen conducted the prior week with David Gregory from Meet the Press.Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, February 15, 2010
Is Krugman Harry Potter? Keynesian Fantasy / Economics / Economic Theory
One of the things one learns (or should learn) in an economics graduate program is that while we hold to certain laws of economics, we do not view the world through a template, and especially one structured from political talking points. For example, as an economist, I can say that if one raises the minimum wage during a recession, one of the results will be increased unemployment among lower-skilled workers, and especially teenagers.
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Sunday, February 14, 2010
Nightmare Macro Economics, Keynesian and New Keynesian Variety / Economics / Economic Theory
Paul Krugman is such an economist. Austrian economist Bill Anderson's highly recommended blog, Krugman-in- Wonderland, deconstructs Mr. Krugman on a daily basis. There is a lot there that needs to be deconstructed.
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Friday, February 12, 2010
Antal Fekete Fantasy Land Monetary Theory of Hyperinflation That Creates Bonds Boom and Falling CPI / Economics / Economic Theory
Antal Fekete has published an article, "There Is No Business Like Bond Business." It was published on the 24hgold site, which my site links to (my gold price chart). Some of you may have read it. Some of you may be confused. Let me de-confuse you.
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Thursday, February 11, 2010
Robert Prechter on Herding and Markets' "Irony and Paradox" / Stock-Markets / Economic Theory
To anyone new to socionomics, the stock market is saturated with paradox.The following is an excerpt from a classic issue of Robert Prechter's Elliott Wave Theorist. For a limited time, you can visit Elliott Wave International to download the rest of the 10-page issue free.
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Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Inflation or Deflation, Which “ation” is This? / Economics / Economic Theory
I’ve been receiving a number of emails lately asking me whether I am a deflationist or an inflationist. Just as often I am asked if we’re in a deflationary environment or inflationary environment.
My answer to both questions is “yes.”
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Monday, February 08, 2010
Austrian Business Cycle Theory and Global Financial Crisis / Economics / Economic Theory
Ersan Bocutoglu and Aykut Ekinci write: Austrian business-cycle theory (ABCT) is capable of explaining the origin of the current global crisis. Therefore, ABCT provides Austrian economists with an advantageous position, compared to the other schools, in foreseeing this crisis. See, for example, Thornton (June 2004), Karlsson (November 2004), Shostak (August 2005).
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Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Retail Sales Discount Offers Are the Language of Action, Not a Trick / Economics / Economic Theory
Predrag Rajsic writes: In the last several months, retail stores have sales on all sorts of products. Discounts go as far as 90% off. Some of these widespread price reductions can be attributed to the holiday season behind us, while most of them, it seems, were triggered by the recent fall in consumer demand due to the macroeconomic downturn.
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Tuesday, January 26, 2010
The Nature of Socialism / Economics / Economic Theory
Mateusz Machaj writes: I first met Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe in 2003, when he visited Poland for a libertarian conference. Most of the participants were interested in normative issues and political philosophy, whereas very few were interested in Austrian economics. Hence, I was coincidentally the only one to engage with Professor Hoppe in extensive discussions on theories of the Austrian School. I did not hesitate shamelessly to consume his time for the personal benefit of learning more about economics from one of Rothbard's most important followers. After this meeting, fortune continued to smile on me — it turned out that despite substantial geographical distance, I have enjoyed such productive conversations with my German mentor at least few times a year.
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Monday, January 25, 2010
Illusions of the Age of Keynes / Economics / Economic Theory
A year ago George Melloan wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "We're all Keynesian's Again." You remember last January — change was on its way. We had a new rock-star president and he was going to get us out of the mess that Wall Street had got us into. "Now is the time to jump-start job creation, restart lending, and invest in areas like energy, health care, and education that will grow our economy, even as we make hard choices to bring our deficit down," President Obama told Congress. The new president has a worldview that is "all but in name Keynesian," Carl Horowitz wrote last spring.
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Saturday, January 23, 2010
Morality and Economics, A Critical Review of Joseph E. Stiglitz's Writings / Economics / Economic Theory
Joseph Eugene Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2001 and the John Bates Clark Medal in 1979. He is one of the most frequently cited economists in the world and has served as a Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He has been critical of the management of globalization, free-market economists, and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He is the founder of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a think tank on international development based at Columbia University.
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Thursday, January 21, 2010
The Religion of Socialism and the Profit of Reform / Politics / Economic Theory
There is this to be said in behalf of avowed and doctrinaire socialists, that their faith in the State is sublime. To them, the institution of political power is the unerring shepherd of the flock, the guide to the Good Society; it is also the antidote for all evil, the maker of abundance, the embodiment of justice, the sublimation of human aspirations. That they believe. To be sure, they affect an elaborate rationalism, something they call dialectical materialism, which in turn rests on a verbal agglomeration known as Marxian economics. Logic and fact without end have been applied to these notions to prove that they are only notions. But all this cerebration has turned out to be sheer waste of effort as far as influencing the true worshipers is concerned. They still believe. One cannot help but marvel at, and admire, their devotional integrity.
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Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Krugman the Crazy Keynesian Does Not Have Clue / Economics / Economic Theory
Even when Paul Krugman gets it right, he still gets it wrong. Now, I am not someone who is a knee-jerk critic of the guy, although I generally expect Krugman to blame the wrong people and recommend the wrong "solutions."
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Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Academic Economists Serving their Political Masters / Politics / Economic Theory
Frederick Sheehan writes: On January 14, 2010, an academic economist took a rare stance. Tenured professors rarely lift the veil from numbers that governments invent. In "Don't Like the Numbers? Change 'Em," Michael J. Boskin, Ph.D., formerly, an economics professor at Harvard and Yale; formerly, chairman of the Counsel of Economic Advisers in the George H.W. Bush administration; currently, T. M. Friedman Professor of Economics at Stanford University; research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; and board member of the Exxon Mobil Corporation, Oracle Corporation and Vodafone PLC (among others), wielded his sword.
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Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Free Banking versus Large-scale Credit Expansion / Economics / Economic Theory
Observations on the Discussions Concerning Free Banking - The Banking School taught that an overissuance of banknotes is impossible if the bank limits its business to the granting of short-term loans. When the loan is paid back at maturity, the banknotes return to the bank and thus disappear from the market. However, this happens only if the bank restricts the amount of credits granted. (But even then it would not undo the effects of its previous credit expansion. It would merely add to it the effects of a later credit contraction.)
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Monday, January 11, 2010
Does the Government Own the Whole Economy? / Economics / Economic Theory
In a recent New York Times op-ed, economist Robert Shiller (coproducer of the famous housing-price index) recommended that the US government begin to sell claims on fractions of Gross Domestic Product. Besides the practical problems with his proposal, it rests on the premise that the US government owns the entire economy. It will be instructive to parse Shiller's column to see just how badly his collectivist thinking misleads him.
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