Author: Frank Hollenbeck, Mises.org The gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen. In 1975, the top 1% of the U.S. population owned 8% of the economic wealth. Today, they own more than 20%. This is a striking change from the 1950s and 1960s, when the top 1% owned just over 10%. A study by Emmanuel Saez found that …

This article will be devoted to the market structures created by the neoclassical mainstream school. A retrospective of the concept of competition from the classical economists onwards will be made, and thus it will be possible to answer the question of why and how the models of perfect and imperfect competition were created. First, what is a market? Every …

Wherever we turn, deflation is always portrayed negatively, and every author is quick to present the fight against deflation as the absolute minimum for economic competence. There are two definitions of deflation: one is a “fall in the price level,” as measured by the so-called Consumer Price Index; a definition common to mainstream economists. …

Author: Hans-Hermann Hoppe The original text in English can be found here. One of the most widely accepted statements among political economists is the following: every monopoly is bad from the consumer's point of view. Monopoly in its classical meaning is the right of exclusive privilege granted to one producer of a good or service, i.e. the absence of free …

The global wine market is driven by wine consumption habits, rapid urbanization, changing lifestyles and high incomes, the popularity of wine products during holidays, as well as an aging population that prefers wine over other hard drinks. Wine consumption is increasing worldwide and …

Most economists have opinions about what stage of the business cycle an economy is in. But if you haven't noticed, many of their predictions turn out to be wrong. For example, Ben Bernanke in 2007 (then chairman of the Federal Reserve) predicted that the US was not headed for a recession and that …

The investment community and financial media pay close attention to interest rates—the price a borrower pays to borrow money—and for good reason. When the U.S. Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC for short), or any other central bank committee, sets a target for …

According to mainstream economics, the central bank is the key factor in determining the level of interest rates. By setting short-term interest rates and based on expectations about the future course of its interest rate policy, it influences the entire structure of interest rates. It follows that economic players have almost no …

The big economic problem the world faces is linguistic semantics. The word “regulation” is now understood to mean “government regulation.” We are unaware of the alternative: consumer regulation. This is a problem because we accept so much government intervention, when in fact we would be better off without it. We demand some kind of regulation with …

The key ideas of libertarianism have been developing for many centuries. The first hints of them can be found in ancient China, Greece, and Israel; they began to develop into something resembling modern libertarian philosophy in the work of thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson...