David Seymour – Senior Policy Analyst from Frontier Centre for Public Policy

Hello Everyone.

Hope you’re surviving the wintery blast.  This week we have David Seymour a Senior Policy Analyst and Director of the Saskatchewan Office of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy speaking.  He will be examining the claims that ‘Capitalism has failed’.  Here is a short extract that he has given us on what he will cover.

“Now it seems that the welfare state is failing in a much more profound way.  In the United States, Italy, Greece, and to a lesser extent New Zealand, the political systems produce expectations around taxes and entitlements that do not balance, leading to deficits, debts, and disruption.  Drawing on public choice economics, ecology, and the history of collapsed societies, I’ll argue that our current democratic process is a case of the tragedy of the commons.  Like environmental commons tragedies, the solution is to return more decision making to the private realm.”

Sound interesting?  Come along and find out.

Date: Tuesday August 16th

Time: 6pm

Location: UOA Business School.  Case Room 1, Level Zero

Reisman Course Cancelled This Weekend

Hi there,

Just a quick note that the Reisman Course (Sunday Economics) is cancelled this Sunday (14th August)

It will resume next Sunday.

Regards,

The UOA Economics Group

The Reserve Bank: The cure or cause of market instability?

Hello Everyone,

This week we have Rodney Dickens coming to speak to us further about the role the Central Bank plays in the Business Cycle.  Rodney Dickens is the former head of Research at ASB Bank and has been a member of the RBNZ’s Monetary Policy Committee.  He is now the Managing Director of Strategic Research Analysis and brings a unique perspective on how the market operates from his 25 years experience working as an Economist.

In a recent media release he showed how lowering the OCR during the early 2000′s created the boom bust property cycle.  [Some reaction to his media release here.] While this created short-term employment for those in the building industry, it ultimately left many people out of pocket, as over 50 different finance companies collapsed and billions of dollars in investments were lost.  As markets around the world continue to struggle, come and hear an interesting perspective on how this story began.

Date: Tuesday 9th August

Time: 7pm

Location: Case Room One, Level 0, UOA Business School

Please note the change of time for this week to 7pm.

Look forward to seeing you there.

Introduction to Law and Economics

There is great course being put on by the LEANZ on Law and Economics.  The reading material includes ‘Economics for Real People’ by Gene Callahan and ‘Economics in One Lesson’ by Henry Hazlitt, both of which you can find in the Resources Section of the Blog.  This may be a little expensive for students but anyone working for a company which sponsors short courses this is one not to be missed.  Go here for further information http://leanz.org.nz/leanz-short-course—intro-to-l-e

LEANZ SEMINAR

INTRODUCTION to LAW & ECONOMICS

Professor Basil Sharp

Goals of the Course

This course is designed to give  participants a solid understanding of, and experience with, the application of economic models to law and organization, and  legal aspects of public policy.  The seminar series will  provide a comprehensive coverage of the field of law and economics for law and economic policy practitioners.

Upon successful completion of this course, participants should be able to apply an appropriate economic model to a range of topics  in property, contracts and torts, and identify the economic consequences of alternative legal rules.

Course Outline

The course will cover the economic analysis of law and organization, and the application of economics to property rights, patents and natural resource management. Topics include: contracts, transaction cost analysis, classical contracting, long-run contracts, enforcement, the role of market forces, risk aversion, remedies for breach, the economic theory for torts, negligence rules, strict liability, multiple torts, product

liability, crime, insider trading, business law and competition policy.

Learning and Teaching

The course will be conducted over eight weeks on Monday mornings from the 29

thof August 2011 to 31^st October (missing 5^th September and 24^th of October), from 8.00am to 9.30am—cutting as little as reasonably possible out of the working day.

Readings on the Money and the Business Cycle

For those who haven’t been able to make it to the last couple of weeks, here is some material that is well worth looking at.

“On the Origins of Money”
Carl Menger
www.mises.org/books/origins_of_money.pdf 

Peter Schiff Lecture: Financial Bubbles Explained
“Why the Meltdown Should Have Surprised No-One”
Peter Schiff, 2009
60 min. video presentation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPF2rxUyCTU

Meltdown
Thomas Woods
Chapter 4, ‘How Government Causes the Boom-Bust Economic Cycle’
[Get a free chapter of the book here:
http://www.meltdownthebook.com/offers/offer.php?id=MEL001 

 

“The Global Financial/Economic Crisis: Causes & Solution”

David McGregor
[Article online at
http://pc.blogspot.com/2008/11/global-financialeconomic-crisis-true.html

Economics For Real People
Gene Callahan
Chapter 13: “Times Are Hard: On the Causes of the Business Cycle”
Book online at www. mises.org/books/econforrealpeople.pdf

“Financial Crisis and Recession”Jesus Huerta de Soto

 http://mises.org/daily/3138 

“Our Financial House of Cards”
“The Myth that Laissez-Faire is Responsible for the Economic Crisis”
“Credit Expansion, Economic Inequality and Stagnant Wages”
“The Housing Bubble and the Credit Crunch”
George Reisman
http://mises.org/daily/2926 and http://mises.org/daily/3165 and
http://georgereisman.com/blogWP/?tag=boom-bust and http://georgereisman.com/blogWP/?tag=credit-crunch

“The Origin of Money & Its Value”

Robert Murphy
http://mises.org/daily/1333

“There’s No Such Thing as ‘Overproduction’” Thomas Woods
http://www.fee.org/articles/great-myths-of-the-great-depression/

The Austrian Theory: A Summary
Roger W. Garrison
http://mises.org/tradcycl/theorsum.asp 
Time & Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure
Roger Garrison

Chapter 4, ‘Sustainable and Unsustainable Growth’

http://www.auburn.edu/~garriro/tam.htm

Friedrich A. Hayek
http://mises.org/tradcycl/avoidinf.asp

Economic Depressions: Their Causes & Cure
Murray Rothbard
http://mises.org/daily/3127 

Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
Ludwig Von Mises
Chapter 17, ‘Indirect Exchange’
Chapter 18, ‘Action in the Passing of Time’
Chapter 19, ‘Interest’
Chapter 20 ‘Interest, Credit Expansion & the Trade Cycle’
Chapter 31, ‘Currency, Credit Creation & the Business Cycle’
Book online at http://www.econlib.org/library/Mises/HmA/msHmA.html

The Great Depression
Lionel Robbins
Chapter 1: “1914-1933”
Chapter 2: Miconceptiions”
Chapter 3: “The Genesis of the Depression”
Book online at http://mises.org/books/depression-robbins.pdf 

Mark A. Abrams
Chapter: “Can Price Stabilisation Help?”
[Chapter available in Austrian Economics: A Reader, ed, by Richard M. Ebeling]

The Organisation of Debt Into Currency
Charles Holt Carroll

You can read an introduction to this important but little-known book here:
http://mises.org/daily/2114.   The complete book is online at
http://mises.org/etexts/currency.pdf 

The Origins of Money

Hello Everyone,

The news today is full of concerns over the state of the world’s economies; in fact these concerns have not subsided for the last three years. This has resulted in many central banks around the world having increased their printing of money, especially so in the United States which has printed hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of US currency.

But what theory is advanced for doing this?

Can printing bits of paper actually solve an economy’s problems?

And what are the long-term consequences of such a policy?

To help answer these questions we need to examine the often misunderstood economic concepts of inflation and deflation.

In this week’s seminar we set out to better understand these concepts. To do so we must first look at the origins of money and ask some more fundamental questions as to what money actually is. Did the market for money develop naturally or spontaneously or did it require a central authority to mandate its use?

Date: Tuesday, 2nd August 

Time: 6:00pm

Room: University of Auckland Business School, Owen G Glenn Building, Case Room One (Level Zero)

 

Look forward to seeing you then,

The University of Auckland Economics Group