Austrian Economics Golden Opportunities Fund
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Marc Faber Limited May 26, 2003
THE GLOOM, BOOM & DOOM REPORT ISSN 1017-1371 A PUBLICATION OF MARC FABER LIMITED MAY 26, 2003 Do Great Investment Opportunities Knock on Your Door Only Once??? It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1890) INTRODUCTION from the list of most livable cities. people’s homes. The danger in According to a survey conducted by Thailand isn’t violence, but poor As some of my readers may know, Mercer Human Resources driving. Most drivers in the north almost three years ago I moved my Consulting, Zurich has the world’s don’t observe road rules, and few family to Chiangmai, where we have highest quality of life, ahead of even have a driver’s licence. Each remodelled an old Thai house by the Vancouver and Vienna. In the US, year during Sonkran (the week-long river that runs through the city. Now, San Francisco was the top-rated city Thai New Year’s festival during my office building is also 99% (placed number 18), while New York which people throw water at each completed (in Thailand, nothing is was rated number 44 and Los Angeles other, and which is actually a lot of ever 100% finished) and this is the 53. -
'1E and on the Giannini Foundation J'
l i37 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS, CALIF. 95616 University of California College of Agriculture Agricultural Experiment Station Berkeley, California ii. I ! J INFLATION AND AGRICULTURE by J. M.lTinley Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics, ~tk Associate Agricultural Economist in the Experiment Station '1e and on the Giannini Foundation j'. ' - A Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Farm Economics Association,, Reno" Nevada June 23, 24, and 25, 1937 re INFLATION AND AGRICULTURE J. M. Tinley College of Agriculture University of California What is inflation? The Encyclopaedia of tho Social Sc.iences states that the meaning an economist associates with the terms "inflation" or its opposite, "deflation," is apt to vary in accordance with his views regarding the money-credit-price mechanism. It then proceeds to enumerate a dozen or more definitions or variations of definitions by economists like Keynes, Cassels, and Laughlin. Still other definitions are given by Kemmerer, Hardy, and Mohr. To be in style I shall be presumptious enough to present my own dofinition or rather understanding of the term. The layman usually applies the terms inflation and deflation to increases or decreases in the general level of prices, regardless of the causes of such changes. Economists, however, usually apply the terms mainly to rapid price changes originating on the money•credit side of tho equation of exchange - changes in the volume of circulating media (including velocity) in relation to the volume of trade. Within recent years some economists (especially some New Deal economists) have given the terms a somewhat new meaning. They visualize some sort of a norm or stubiltzod price level. -
The Austrian Theory of Money by Murray N
The Austrian Theory of Money By Murray N. Rothbard [Reprinted from The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics, Edwin Dolan, ed. (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1976), pp. 160-84.; The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1997), pp. 297-320. The pagination on this edition corresponds to the Logic edition.] The Austrian theory of money virtually begins and ends with Ludwig von Mises's monumental Theory of Money and Credit, published in 1912.1 Mises's fundamental accomplishment was to take the theory of marginal utility, built up by Austrian economists and other marginalists as the explanation for consumer demand and market price, and apply it to the demand for and the value, or the price, of money. No longer did the theory of money need to be separated from the general economic theory of individual action and utility, of supply, demand, and price; no longer did monetary theory have to suffer isolation in a context of "velocities of circulation," "price levels," and "equations of exchange." In applying the analysis of supply and demand to money, Mises used the Wicksteedian concept: supply is the total stock of a commodity at any given time; and demand is the total market demand to gain and hold cash balances, built up out of the marginal-utility rankings of units of money on the value scales of individuals on the market. The Wicksteedian concept is particularly appropriate to money for several reasons: first, because the supply of money is either extremely durable in relation to current production, as under the gold standard, or is determined exogenously to the market by government authority; and, second and most important, because money, uniquely among commodities desired and demanded on the market, is acquired not to be consumed, but to be held for later exchange. -
Measures of Underlying Inflation and Their Role in the Conduct of Monetary Policy
PROCEEDINGS June 1999 MEASURES OF UNDERLYING INFLATION AND THEIR ROLE IN THE CONDUCT OF MONETARY POLICY Proceedings of the workshop of central bank model builders held at the BIS on 18-19 February 1999 BANK FOR INTERNATIONAL SETTLEMENTS Monetary and Economic Department Basel, Switzerland Note: The papers included in this volume are to be considered as working papers. They should be cited as working papers and considered preliminary drafts of any subsequent publication. They are reproduced here to make them easily available to anyone having an interest in the subject of the workshop because participation in the workshop is restricted to central banks. Although all papers have been screened for relevance to the subject matter of the workshop, they have not been subject to a rigorous refereeing process nor edited for form or content by the Bank for International Settlements. Copies of publications are available from: Bank for International Settlements Information, Press & Library Services CH-4002 Basel, Switzerland Fax: +41 61 / 280 91 00 and +41 61 / 280 81 00 This publication is available on the BIS website (www.bis.org). © Bank for International Settlements 1999. All rights reserved. Brief excerpts may be reproduced or translated provided the source is stated. ISBN 92-9131-072-7 PROCEEDINGS June 1999 MEASURES OF UNDERLYING INFLATION AND THEIR ROLE IN THE CONDUCT OF MONETARY POLICY Proceedings of the workshop of central bank model builders held at the BIS on 18-19 February 1999 BANK FOR INTERNATIONAL SETTLEMENTS Monetary and Economic Department -
Where Keynes Went Wrong
Praise for Where Keynes Went Wrong “[An] impassioned . and . much needed book. In plain prose, . Hunter Lewis . begins by patiently walking us through precisely what Keynes said . then reveals why Keynes’s work is ‘remarkably unsupported by evidence or logic.’ Lewis does much more besides, showing how Keynesianism has lived in the minds and hearts of politicians, with disastrous results.” —Gene Epstein, Barron’s “Lewis has exposed with unmatched clarity the lineaments of Keynes’s system and enabled us to see exactly its disabling defects. Keynes defied common sense, unable to sustain the brilliant para- doxes that his fertile intellect constantly devised. Lewis’s book is an ideal guide to Keynes’s dangerous and destructive economics. .” —David Gordon, LewRockwell.com “Just what the world needs, and just in time. Keynes is demolished and his quack system refuted. But this wonderful book does more. It restores clear thinking and common sense to their rightful places in the economic policy debate. Three cheers for Hunter Lewis!” —James Grant, Editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer “Hunter Lewis has written a splendid book called Where Keynes We nt Wrong. The dissection of the English economist who died in 1946 is especially timely, given that the past two administra- tions and the current one are identical in believing wholeheart- edly in . key Keynesian dogma.” —Patrick McIlheran, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “[This] compelling, powerful, and extremely readable book . is fantastic. ‘Must’ reading.” —Kevin Price, CBS and CNN Radio and BizPlusBlog “Lewis has done a service, even if in the negative, of concisely and critically summarizing Keynes’s economic theories, and his book will make readers think.” —Library Journal “[This] highly readable . -
Mr. Chetan Parikh and Mr. J.Mulraj of Capital Ideas Online Interviewed Dr Marc Faber
Mr. Chetan Parikh and Mr. J.Mulraj of Capital Ideas Online interviewed Dr Marc Faber . Dr Marc Faber was born in Zurich and studied Economics at the University of Zurich, obtaining a Ph.D. at the age of 24. Between 1970 and 1978 he worked at White Weld & Co Ltd. For the next twelve years he was the Managing Director of Drexel Burnham Lambert, based in Hong Kong. In 1990 he set up his own firm Marc Faber Ltd., acting as an investment advisor, fund manager and broker/dealer. He is a well known ‘contrarian investor’ and brings out a monthly newsletter called the ‘Gloom, Boom and Doom Report’. His website is at www.gloomboomdoom.com. He is the author of a boom ‘The Great Money Illusion – the Confusion of the Confusions’. He was recently in Mumbai and gave a speech at a function organized by Enam Financial Consultants Ltd. J Mulraj and Chetan Parikh, of www.capitalideasonline.com interviewed Dr Faber in Mumbai. Q: Thank you Dr. Faber for giving us this interview for capitalideasonline. Even prior to Sept. 11th you had a very bearish outlook on the global economy. The Sept. 11th terrorist attacks have certainly impacted globalization in terms of outsourcing, production, just in time inventory management, supply scale economy. How badly is globalization affected in your opinion and how would global economy growth suffer? A: Actually before Sept. 11th I was particularly negative about the U.S. economy and the economies of the Western industrialized nations. I thought that the Asian economies had bottomed out. And I still think that relatively speaking the Asian economies will do better probably in the years to come and that the financial markets in Asia will do better than say in America. -
Core Inflation: a Review of Some Conceptual Issues
II Core Inflation: A Review of Some Conceptual Issues Mark A. Wynne This paper reviews various approaches to the measurement of core inflation that have been pro- posed over the years using the stochastic approach to index numbers as a unifying framework. It begins with a review of how the concept of core inflation is used by the world’s major central banks, including some of the inflation-targeting central banks. The author provides a comprehensive review of many of the measures of core inflation that have been developed over the years and highlights some of the conceptual and practical problems associated with them. (JEL E31, C43) Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, May/June 2008, 90(3, Part 2), pp. 205-28. he notion of core inflation has played In this paper I critically review various an important role in the deliberations approaches to measuring core inflation by linking of monetary policymakers for the past these approaches in a single theoretical frame- 25 years. However, despite the central work, the so-called stochastic approach to index Trole of this concept, there is still no consensus numbers. I evaluate the competing merits of the on how best to go about measuring core inflation. different approaches and argue that a common The most elementary approach, and the one that shortcoming is the absence of a well-formulated is probably the most widely used, consists of theory of what these measures of inflation are simply excluding certain categories of prices from supposed to be capturing. The notion that they the overall inflation rate. -
Core Inflation: a Review of Some Conceptual Issues*
CORE INFLATION: A REVIEW OF SOME CONCEPTUAL ISSUES* Mark A. Wynne DG Research European Central Bank Kaiserstraße 29 60311 Frankfurt am Main April 1999 Core Inflation: A Review of Some Conceptual Issues Abstract: This paper reviews various approaches to the measurement of core inflation that have been proposed in recent years. The objective is to determine whether the ECB should pay special attention to one or other of these measures in assessing inflation developments in the euro area. I put particular emphasis on the conceptual and practical problems that arise in the measurement of core inflation, and propose some criteria that could be used by the ECB to choose a core inflation measure. * I thank Vítor Gaspar, David Lebow, Fabio Scacciavillani and seminar participants at the ECB for comments. This paper is part of a larger project on the measurement of core inflation in the euro area. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Central Bank or the European System of Central Banks. 1 1. INTRODUCTION The notion of core inflation has played an important role in the deliberations of monetary policymakers for the past twenty-five years. However, despite the central role of this concept, there is still no consensus on how best to go about measuring core inflation. The most elementary approach, and the one that is probably the most widely used, consists of simply excluding certain categories of prices from the overall inflation rate. This is the so-called “Ex. food and energy” approach to core inflation measurement, and it reflects the origin of the concept of core inflation in the turbulent decade of the 1970’s. -
Effects of Inflation Targeting Policy on Inflation Rates and Gross Domestic Product in Ghana
European Journal of Business and Management www.iiste.org ISSN 2222-1905 (Paper) ISSN 2222-2839 (Online) Vol.6, No.21, 2014 Effects of Inflation Targeting Policy on Inflation Rates and Gross Domestic Product in Ghana Albert Puni Department of Administration, University of Professional Studies, Accra, P.O. Box LG 149, Legon Bright Addiyiah Osei Research Centre, University of Professional Studies, Accra, P.O.Box LG 149, Legon Email:[email protected] Charles Barnor Department of Banking and Finance, University of Professional Studies, Accra, P.O. Box LG 149, Legon Abstract Inflation targeting has been widely adopted in both developed and developing economies. The Bank of Ghana (BOG) formally adopted an inflation targeting regime as a major monetary policy framework in May 2007, becoming the second African country to do so after South Africa. This research paper sought to investigate the effect of inflation targeting policy on inflation rates and gross domestic product. The research adopted the quantitative method by comparing the effect of inflation targeting policy on inflation rates and gross domestic product in the pre inflation targeting period (2000-2006) and the post inflation targeting period (2007-2013). The resultsrevealed that there was a significant difference between the mean inflation rates for the two periods. The inflation rate for the post inflation targeting period is significantly less than the pre-inflation targeting period. It was also revealed that inflation targeting did not have a statistically significant effect on economic growth in Ghana. The study concluded that policy makers are encouraged to explore other policy alternative including inflation targeting regime to maximize production in the economy. -
Inflation As a Distribution Problem,As Well As a Monetary Phenomenon
Inflation as a Distribution Problem, as well as a Monetary Phenomena ( Macro Economic Analysis of Inflation and Stagflation in Less Developed Economies ) H. Nazeman Faculty of Economics, A.T.U. , Tehran This paper intends to address the problem of inflation in less developed, and transitional economies, and where the institutions of market is not fully developed and well functioning. Following the introductory analysis of the issue from Post Keynesian view and the Monetarist orthodoxy, it will be demonstrated that current Neo classical analysis based on rigid Monetarist views fails to address the problem properly in the socio- economic environment of the less developed economies, and as a result its policy prescriptions do not succeed. Inflation as a major macro-economic problem in developed economies can be viewed either as an institutional problem deeply rooted in the structural behaviour of society, or as a short run monetary phenomenon simply because of a mismanagement of public finance and monetary system. While Post Keynesian views are mostly focused on the structure of the economy and the nature of distribution, the socio-economic structure of the economy and the role of relevant social institutions. Although the Keynesian / Monetarist argument on effectiveness of stabilization policy may simply be treated as an interesting academic debate in western developed countries, the issue of persisting inflation and subsequent government policy makers, and the professional economists. Consequently a realistic analysis of the problem should consider both structural aspect of the phenomenon in terms of the capacity of social institutions and distribution pattern prevailing in the economy, as well as the short run behaviour of economic agents. -
Some Issues in Monetary Economics January 1970
Some Issues in Monetary Economies* By DAVID I. FAND Public policies are continuously sought which will assist in guiding the economy between the perils of inflation and the dangers of unemployment and under-production. During the last five years the perils of inflation have become increasingly apparent, and during the past year stabilization actions have been taken to reduce the rate of advance of the price level. At the present time there is growing concern that these actions may lead the economy into a recession, What are the vehicles and avenues of stabilization policy which can best restore the econ- oniy to a satisfactory course, that is, a high and rising level of output and employment with a reasonably stable price level? Unfortunately, students of this problem are not in ~ubstan- tial agreement on an answer. Economists have tended to fall into two conflicting schools of thought regarding economic stabilization — the income-expenditure approach and the modern quantity theory of money approach. Until recently, the dominant school has been the modern version of the income-expendi- ture theory which has evolved from the work of John Maynard Keynes in the 1930’s. Policy- makers in the 1950’s and 1960’s generally adopted the theoretical framework of this school for the formulation of economic stabilization actions. Primary emphasis was given to fiscal actions — Federal government spending and taxing programs — in guiding the economy be- tween inflation and unemployment. During the last two decades, proponents of the modern quantity theory of money have increasingly challenged the basic propositions of the income- expenditure school. -
INFLATION and ITS CONTROL Everett E
INFLATION AND ITS CONTROL Everett E. Peterson, Extension Economist, University of Nebraska, and Richard G. Ford, Extension Economist, Federal Extension Service' The authors of the many speeches and writings on inflation can be divided roughly into two opinion groups. One group argues that a little inflation is good because it stimulates economic growth and bene- fits most people and that steps can be taken to care for those few who are injured. The second group holds that any inflation is bad, that creeping inflation will get out of hand, and that stable prices are con- sistent with full empoyment and economic growth. The following quotations are typical of current writings on inflation: Let us not minimize the explosive potentials of this economic outlaw. In its exaggerated form-when inflation shifts from a creep to a gallop- it has bred dictators, toppled governments, ruined nations. And, when it gets so out of hand, it can kill the goose that lays the golden eggs of eco- nomic growth by discouraging the savings with which we buy the machines to increase our productivity. Even in its creepiest form, inflation robs the needy by decreasing the purchasing power of money. The things that a pension or small salary will buy shrink with each creep forward of an inflationary movement. Thus, schoolteachers, pensioners, and those elder citizens who live upon income from a fixed amount of capital, find themselves poorer and poorer. The savings upon which so many of our people rely for their support in old age, or to gain earlier independence, are constantly diminished in value.