In a November 3 article, the Wall Street Journal reports that corporate cash holdings have reached extraordinary levels:
Stung by the financial crisis, companies are holding more cash — and a greater percentage of assets in cash — than at any time in the past 40 years.
In the second quarter, the 500 largest nonfinancial U.S. firms, [...]

Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs is interviewed here by Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fox News’ program, “Freedom Watch,” regarding the utter folly of the gigantic federal spending programs first started under George W. Bush and now enormously expanded by Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress. Prolonging the recovery amidst enormous economic confusion and new [...]

Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs is interviewed on Fox News’ “Freedom Watch with Judge Andrew Napolitano” on how Barack Obama is Herbert Hoover’s true “Progressive” heir as an economic interventionist, corporatist and protectionist. Hoover’s policies caused the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt then continued and greatly expanded such policies as his New Deal, deepening [...]

The U.S. rate of unemployment has been rising since March 2007, when it stood at 4.4 percent. In 2007 it rose slowly, then in 2008 and 2009 much more quickly. In August 2009 it reached 9.7 percent. The increase in unemployment represents for most people the most troubling aspect of the current recession.
However, during the [...]

September 1, 1939—exactly seventy years ago today—is customarily considered the day when World War II began, owing to the German invasion of Poland. Of course, some belligerents, most notably the Japanese and the Chinese, had already been at war for years, and others did not join the fray until later. The United States actually began to [...]

I recently read a book titled Banking and the Business Cycle: A Study of the Great Depression in the United States, by C. A. Phillips, T. F. McManus, and R. W. Nelson.  It was originally published by Macmillan in March 1937, later became a hard-to-find, almost-forgotten book, and in 2007 was reissued by the Mises Institute in an inexpensive paperback edition.
No [...]

Alternative answers to this week’s Time magazine cover quiz: “What Barack Obama Can Learn from FDR”:
Changing the rules of the game prolongs economic downturns:
“Regime Uncertainty in 1937 and 2008,” here.
“Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed after the War,” here.
“Banking Act of 1935 + Fed’s Exercise of This Authority [...]

In the mid-1990s, when I was engaged in the research that would eventually be published early in 1997 in an article titled “Regime Uncertainty” (a modestly revised version of which appears as chapter 1 of my Depression, War, and Cold War), I had not read Raymond Moley’s book After Seven Years, published in 1939. Mea [...]

Rand or Rothbard couldn’t have done a better job. This speech (watch YouTube here) has it all for libertarians. It comes from a character in Elia Kazan’s film Wild River (1960), who is fighting a land grab by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Delivered beautifully by actress Jo Van Fleet, the speech blasts FDR’s New Deal, [...]

With Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress pushing their corporatist, new “New Deal”, could the following editorial cartoon once again be timely? Entitled “Planned Economy or Planned Destruction?” the cartoon first appeared during the Great Depression in the Chicago Tribune on April 21, 1934, and features New Deal economist Rexford G. Tugwell (Head, Resettlement Administration) [...]