Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French thinker who did most of his writing in the last six years of his life. One of his major contributions to economic thought was his application of opportunity cost to a wide range of economic policies. The present paper uses the Bastiat approach to...

Whether justified by the concrete circumstances or not, an economic crisis is, by simple association, taken as an implicit refutation of the invisible hand vision and the underlying theory. The fundamental heterodox critique locates the source of apparent theoretical difficulties at the level of...

Whether justified by the concrete circumstances or not, an economic crisis is, by simple association, taken as an implicit refutation of the invisible hand vision and the underlying theory. The fundamental heterodox critique locates the source of apparent theoretical difficulties at the level of...

This paper honors Don Lavoie's work on the relationship between theory and history in Austrian economics by using the current recession as an example of many of the ideas found in his paper on the “Interpretive Dimension of Economics.” More specifically, I start from the premise that all...

The business cycles theories of Wicksell (1898), Schumpeter (1912), Mises (1912), Hayek (1929, 1935) and Minsky (1986, 1992) explain business cycles by distorted prices on capital markets, buoyant credit expansion and overinvestment. The exuberance during the boom endogenously causes the...

In diesem Beitrag werden die Grundzüge der Überinvestitionstheorien von Hyman Minsky auf der einen und die von v. Hayek/Garrison auf der anderen Seite zunächst in den „Sprachen“ der Originalbeiträge herausgearbeitet. Anschließend wird ihr möglicher Erklärungsbeitrag für die aktuelle...

We identify the origin of the contradicting perspectives on credit creation offered by Austrian, Mainstream and Post Keynesian economists as the neglect of the primacy of such assets as goods, properties and securities, which always pre-exist any transaction and loan. We develop a unified...

n the midst of the current financial crisis the economics profession has seen a monumental resurrection of Keynesian ideas. The debate, which Keynes started back in the 1930s, is being picked up again, not where it left off, but in exactly the same place it started. While Keynesian theories were...

Following the 2008/09 financial crisis renewed attention has been given to the ability of central banks to effectively monitor the quantity of money in circulation. We present a new definition of the money supply called “Austrian money supply” (MA) and apply it to the UK economy. Unlike...

The paper analyses in light of Austrian and Keynesian economic theory the impact of conventional and unconventional monetary policies as therapies for financial crises. It compares the financial market stabilization measures of the Federal Reserve System and the European System of Central Banks...