The Human Action Podcast

Bob returns to the fractional reserve banking debate to clarify a point the critics keep missing: in the Mises-Hayek-Rothbard framework, it's fractional reserve banking itself that sets the boom-bust cycle in motion, not merely central banks.

Related:

• Lawrence White, Free Banking in Britain: Mises.org/HAP561a

Bob reviews Murray Rothbard's 1988 essay "The Myth of Free Banking in Scotland," his sharp response to Larry White's influential account of Scottish free banking.

Related:

• Rothbard's Article, "The Myth of Free Banking in Scotland": Mises.org/HAP560a
• Bob's Debate...

Bob sits down with the managing editor of the Libertarian Institute, Keith Knight, to sample arguments from his recent four-hour video cataloguing sixty-four problems with democratic socialism.

Related:

• Find More from Keith Here: Mises.org/HAP559a
• 64 Arguments A...

Bob uses U.S. economic history, centering on the greenback era, to work through some subtle but important distinctions in Austrian monetary theory. He also addresses whether free-market economies have a natural tendency toward price deflation under a commodity standard, why the stock-versus-flow distinction matters for understanding gold production and the price level, and how to distinguish "bad" policy-induced monetary deflation ...

In the wake of Alan Greenspan's recent passing, Bob revisits two contested claims about his legacy: did the Fed under Greenspan fuel the housing bubble, and did that bubble cause the 2008 financial crisis? 

Related:

• Bob's Article from October, 2007, "The Worst Recession in 25 years?": Mises.org/HAP557a

Bob sits down with fund manager and author Lawrence Lepard to discuss his book The Big Print, which argues that the core problem with modern America is not corporate greed or partisan politics, but a monetary system deliberately structured to benefit those closest to the Fed at the expense of wage earners and savers.

Related:

• The Big Print: What...

Bob sits down with Harvard Economics Professor Pol Antràs to discuss his new paper applying Böhm-Bawerk's average period of production to international trade, testing whether countries with lower interest rates tend to export goods requiring longer, more roundabout production processes.

Related:

• Professor Antràs' Paper, "An ‘Austrian&rsquo...

Bob sits down with economists Alexander Salter and Joshua Hendrickson to discuss their new paper arguing that the standard Austrian critique of the Fed while correct, is fundamentally incomplete. They argue that the Fed's actual institutional role is to backstop U.S. dollar hegemony: the deliberately constructed post-Bretton Woods system in which the dollar serves as the world's reserve currency, U.S. Treasuries as the global safe ...

Bob sits down with economist Emmanuel Maggiori to discuss his new book If You Can Just Print Money, Why Do I Pay Taxes?, a carefully researched, point-by-point critique of Modern Monetary Theory that engages MMT on its own terms, drawing on the MMTers' own textbook, papers, and responses to critics.

Related:

• If You Can Just Print Money...

This week, Bob walks through three thought experiments to show how expectations of future supply changes ripple into present prices and production decisions in ways that purely mechanical monetary frameworks like MV=PQ can't capture.

Related:

• How Can Mining Asteroids in the Future Make Us Richer Today?: Mises.org/HAP551a

Bob sits down with Dr. Jonathan Newman to discuss his Mises Academy course for homeschooling families based on Lessons for the Young Economist, using it as a starting point to walk through the full Austrian case against socialism.

Related:

• The Mises Academy: Mises.org/HAP550a

Bob argues that many Austro-libertarians (himself included, initially) have been too quick to dismiss the Trump administration's foreign and economic policy as mere incompetence or corruption, without grasping the strategic logic behind it. His thesis: the U.S. national security establishment sees China's rise as an existential threat and believes the window to act is closing fast, making the current flurry of aggressive moves...

Bob responds to a new working paper from the Geo-chartalism project, which claims to offer a complete theory of the price level by combining insights from Menger, Cantillon, and Warren Mosler. Bob argues that the paper overlooks a crucial prior contribution: Mises' regression theorem, developed in The Theory of Money and Credit, which already solved the circularity problem in monetary theory that the paper claims required Mosler to...

Bob sits down with researcher Robert Aro to review his recent Mises.org article on why the widely anticipated post-QT crash never materialized. They trace the answer back to the Fed's reverse repo facility, which quietly injected trillions back into the financial system even as the official balance sheet was shrinking, and what the depletion of that buffer might mean for what comes next.

Related:

Bob sits down with macro researcher Luke Gromen of Forest for the Trees to discuss the cascading supply chain consequences of a closed Strait of Hormuz. They also touch on why gold is already supplanting the dollar as the world's premier reserve asset, and what the surge in U.S. gold exports over the past five months tells us about where the global monetary order is heading.

The Mises Institute is giving away 100,000 copies of ...

After his recent Zero Hedge debate with MMT co-founder Randall Wray, Bob takes a deep dive into the sectoral balance approach. He explains why the MMT argument is technically a tautology, how it's deeply misleading, and why the private sector doesn't need government deficits to save, invest, and accumulate real wealth.

Related:

• Is Paying Down Go...

This week, Bob explains Cantillon effects: the insight that new money doesn't raise all prices equally or simultaneously, but flows through the economy in a sequence that benefits early recipients at the expense of everyone else. Then, he shows why this phenomenon is the foundation on which the entire Austrian theory of the business cycle is built.

Related:

Bob untangles two arguments that even Austrian economists sometimes conflate: Mises' calculation problem and Hayek's knowledge problem. Then, he explains why the distinction matters, especially in light of recent claims that AI and modern computing could finally make central planning viable.

Related:

• Bob's Article, "Socialism: The Calculati...