To partisans of the Austrian theory of the business cycle, the cause of the current financial crisis is as plain as day — and that’s why we’ve been predicting it for years. You would think that the neo-Keynesians, monetarists, and Marxists who made fun of us Austrians in 2006 and 2007, and said we’d never [...]

Evelyn Black wrote a great blog on September 26 explaining the financial inter-connectedness of the U.S. and China. To sum it up, she says that the U.S. imports more from China than it exports to China. This difference, the trade deficit, is made up by the Chinese government’s investment in U.S. government debt. In other [...]

Based on a  September 18 Times (UK) report regarding the meeting of Middle Eastern finance ministers, the question was asked about the veracity of a plan for a single currency for the Middle East based on oil.
The answer is both true and false and maybe.
Yes, the immediate goal of the meeting last week was to [...]

Tries to understand the long term economic consequences of outsourcing

The federal government’s debt will soon reach $10 trillion. That’s about $130,000 per family of four in the United States.
But if you think that’s bad, then consider the real national debt. After all, the phony $9+ trillion “debt” does not include any of the following:

The Social Security deficit
The Medicare budget shortfall
The new Medicare Prescription Drug [...]

This being one of my first posts on Amateur Economists I initially thought I would do an introduction. But then I happened on The Huffington Post article National Review Blogger Terrified Of New Five-Dollar Bill and it got my goat enough to change topics. They quote Mark Krikorian in his blog [...]

There was once a time long ago when many economies ran on a barter system. There was no fiat money. There was no central banking system. There was no Federal Reserve to insure the validity of any currency. If you wanted a bag of rice you traded with what you grew or produced. As financial [...]