“Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke spent most of his speech to the American Economic Association on Jan. 3 responding to the critique that easy monetary policy during 2002-2005 contributed to the housing boom, to excessive risk taking, and thereby to the financial crisis. Many have expressed the view that monetary policy was too easy…

“There are significant parallels between the Roaring 1920s and the Bullish 1980s. Both decades were characterized by a policy-induced artificial boom that ended with an inevitable bust. The Federal Reserve had a hand in both episodes, keeping the interest rate artificially low in the first one and keeping Treasury bills artificially risk-free in the second.…

“This essay reinterprets the gold standard by applying the monetary theory of the balance of payments to the experience of the two most important countries on it, America and Britain. Before explaining, testing and using the theory in detail, it will be useful to indicate a few of the ways in which accepting it will…

“This government is now on a gold basis; that is to say, the nation stands pledged to redeem all its debts or obligations in gold. This is not the result of arbitrary legislation on our part, but a necessity imposed by the demands of trade and commerce. Foreign purchasers of American products pay in gold,…

“It can be argued that two apparently divergent macroeconomic schools of thought that have persisted in the history of economics are both part of a larger theoretical view which is capable of meeting most of these criteria. The Austrian theory of the trade cycle as described by Ludwig von Mises (1912, 1966) and F. A.…

This paper examines the effects of inflation uncertainty on real economic activityb y utilizing a flexible, dynamic,m ultivariatef rameworkt hata ccom-modates possible interaction between the conditional means and variances. The empirical model is based on a familiar identified vector autoregressive framework, modified to accommodate multivanate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity Our empirical model is preferred to…

“Neoclassical treatments of inflation understate the costs associated with inflation, even at very low levels. A comparative institutions perspective that recognizes the epistemological properties of prices and the institutional process by which inflation takes place, reveals the costs of inflation to be both larger and more widespread than standard treatments suggest. This paper makes use…

“There is much evidence that common stock returns and inflation have been negatively related during the post-1953 period. Zvi Body, Jeffrey Jaffe and Gershon Mandelker, Charles Nelson, and my article with G. William Schwert document negative relations between between stock returns and both the expected and unexpected components of inflation. These results are puzzling given…

“President Obama rammed through his new stimulus bill, warning of an irreversible recession if Congress failed to act. But bestselling author Thomas E. Woods Jr. warns that Obama’s “stimulus package” will do far more damage to our economy than even the Republicans in Congress realize. In his New York Times bestseller, Meltdown, Woods shows how…