Tag Archives: Credit Rating Agencies

Study Break; Course on Money and Credit, J. Rogers on Rating Agencies

Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.–Steven Wright

Study Break

Let’s take a study break and return to the Coors case study this weekend.  You have a strong foundation of strategic logic to study the case. You learned from Wal-Mart that management did not expand from Arkansas into California or the Northeast back in 1985, but expanded at its periphery (like an amoeba), where it could readily establish the customer captivity and economies of scale that made it dominant. And it defended its base.  What did Coors do?

Mises Academy Course on Money and Credit

I mentioned the course with links to the books and study guide here: http://wp.me/p1PgpH-ix

This article by Professor Murphy discusses the course in more detail. I hope some of you join me in taking this rigorous tour of money and credit. http://mises.org/daily/5878/Mises-on-Money-and-Banking

“Is This Course Going to Be Really Hard?”

Let’s be frank. Mises’s writing at times can be difficult, especially his earlier work when he was writing for other economists, rather than the lay public. The amateur fan of Austrian economics who flips through The Theory of Money & Credit might recoil, thinking it is too hard and that anything important from the book would have been distilled by Rothbard in Man, Economy, and State.

If I’ve just described your view, I suggest doing the first week’s reading (the first two chapters from Mises) with my study guide as a companion. You might be pleasantly surprised to discover that Mises’s prose, though a bit formal, is still accessible to the layperson. If — using my study guide for help — you can get through the first week’s readings, then I believe you have what it takes to get through the whole class. It’s true, we will get into material that is more complicated than what Mises lays out in the opening chapters, but then again that’s what you have me for, to explain it for you.

Now if you determine that you are capable of digesting the material, I would urge you to take the plunge and sign up for the course. Yes, Rothbard and others have explained the Austrian theory of the business cycle in other venues. However, by exploring the Misesian framework of money and banking, you will walk away with a much deeper understanding of his theory of economic fluctuations. For example, the typical objection that “we had business cycles before the Fed, so the Austrians are obviously wrong” will seem quite ludicrous after studying Mises’s classic work.

 Jim Rogers Savages the Credit Rating Agencies

http://lewrockwell.com/rogers-j/rogers-j163.html