Friday, February 1, 2013

HAYEK ON BUSINESS CYCLES AND TRADE


F. A. Hayek, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 7: Business Cycles, Part I , edited by Hansjoerg Klausinger (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "In the years following its publication, F. A. Hayek's pioneering work on business cycles was regarded as an important challenge to what was later known as Keynesian macroeconomics. Today, as debates rage on over the monetary origins of the current economic and financial crisis, economists are once again paying heed to Hayek's thoughts on the repercussions of excessive central bank intervention." "[This volume] contains Hayek's two major contributions on the topic: Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle and Prices and Production. Moving away from the classical emphasis on equilibrium analysis, Hayek demonstrates that business cycles are generated by the adaption of the structure of production to changes in relative demand. Thus, when central banks artificially lower interest rates, the result is a misallocation of capital and the creation of asset bubbles and additional instability.").

F. A. Hayek, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 8: Business Cycles, Part II , edited by Hansjoerg Klausinger (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "[This volume] builds on Hayek's argument that money is the crucial element for explaining movements away from equilibrium, assembling a series of Hayek's shorter papers on the topic, ranging from the 1920s to 1981.").