Abstract

The recent revival of boom-bust business cycles and the worldwide slow recovery from 2009–2012 has renewed interest in the analysis of a money-production economy developed by Keynes and capital-structure-based Austrian macroeconomics developed by Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, and, most recently, Garrison. Both approaches identify time, money, banking, financial markets, interest, and investment as the major sources of coordination failure leading to recession or depression. When compared with single-aggregate modern macroeconomic models, both Keynes’s and the Austrians’ models, with their lower level of aggregation, provide a better understanding of how an economy goes wrong, However, the chapter argues that Keynes’s model is flawed because it lacks a capital-structure foundation. Keynesian macroeconomic policy is generally unnecessary and, if applied consistently, destabilizes the economy. Austrian economics and its capital-based macroeconomics provide better guidance on cause, recovery, and, more important, prevention.