Financial Transparency Coalition

In the past few years the world—and the United States in particular—has witnessed a resurgence of the term “Austrian economics.” Last week I wrote a post about the academic history and resurgence of Austrian economics in the last few years. I wrote that the reason for this is that the school of thought actually does a fairly good job of both explaining and predicting the financial crisis of 2007-8. Yet while the Austrians have enjoyed a boom in their theories as they are able to explain the sources of the world’s crises, their proposed solutions are a bust....

The global financial crisis—including the housing market bubble in the United States, the plummeting of the stock market, soaring unemployment and the resulting Great Recession worldwide—sparked an inundation of ideas about what we should do next or what we should have done differently. Many of these ideas are not new. In fact, many of them are very old. As a result, particularly in the United Statesand in Europe, we’ve seen a resurgence of economic thought from the full spectrum of thought—from Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman to John Maynard Keynes. One of the ideas that’s gained some traction and popularity...