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This paper investigates the impact of the macroeconomy on Vietnam real estate market (REM). The research data were collected by the authors on a quarterly basis, from the third quarter of 2004 to the last counterpart of 2020. The authors utilize the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. The results reveal that REM is negatively influenced by the macroeconomy (interest rate and global crisis) in the short run and long run. This result is completely consistent with the wealth effect theory, the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABC), as well as the Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT). However, the findings in this paper are valuable empirical evidence on the impact of the macroeconomy on REM in Vietnam, a developing country with relatively nascent REM. In particular, this study has achieved novelty compared to previous studies by finding the negative impact of the global crisis on REM, where the global crisis is defined to include the global financial crisis and the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic crisis. Based on this, Vietnam needs to operate macroeconomic policies flexibly and in accordance with each period in order to develop REM in a stable and sustainable manner.

The classical Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) is based on an inverse relationship between the so-called Average Period of Production (APP) or ‘roundaboutness’ and the interest rate. According to Böhm-Bawerk (1884 [1891]), the APP is the weighted average time that a unit of labor is locked up in the production process1; moreover, there is a positive relationship between savings (the ‘subsistence fund’) and the APP: the higher the latter the higher the former, which implies an inverse relationship between interest rates and the APP. Thus, a lower interest rate will lead to a higher APP ceteris paribus. Hayek (2008) based his Hayekian triangles on Böhm-Bawerk’s work: a lower (higher) interest rate leads to a more (less) rounda- bout structure of production, increasing (decreasing) the APP. Including Mises’s (1921) business cycle theory into the analysis, whenever the interest rate is pushed lower than its ‘natural level’, either by the central bank or the banking system, there is an unsus- tainable extension of the APP that will generate an economic boom; the crisis will irremediably follow, as the APP will pull back towards its natural level. From this brief characterization of the ABCT, it is easy to notice the key role of the inverse relationship between interest rates and roundaboutness; without it, there is no connection from changes in interest rates and roundaboutness, and the ABCT falls apart. The reswitching of techniques is precisely a counterexample to that relationship, as it claims there are situations in which lower interest rates do not lead to more roundabout productive struc- tures. The organization of this paper is as follows: the next section describes the reswitching of techniques as stated by Samuelson (1966) and the implication for the classical ABCT, based on a phys- ical measure of roundaboutness; section 3 analyzes the alternative of applying corporate finance to the ABCT following Cachanosky and Lewin (2014). Section 4 is a financial analysis of Samuelson’s example, argues why modified duration should replace Böhm- Bawerk’s APP as a measure of roundaboutness, and shows why it does not represent a paradox to the ABCT when the financial approach is used. Sections 5 and 6 address the question from two additional perspectives: a neoclassical with fully flexible prices but fixed techniques and the Austrian related dynamic efficiency.

espanolLa teoria austriaca del ciclo economico (ABCT), basada en las ideas de Bohm-Bawerk y Mises, se ha convertido en una de las ideas teoricas cen-trales de la Escuela Austriaca de Economia. La crisis de 2008 parecio dar la razon a la ABCT. No obstante, el dano relativamente pequeno causado por la crisis y la expansion economica mas larga jamas vista, refutaron las advertencias sobre la hiperinflacion y el colapso de la civilizacion.El objetivo de este articulo es explicar la causa del relativo exito del sistema monetario basado en la creacion de credito mediante la reconstruccion del marco teorico original mengeriano combinado con las ideas misesianas. En primer lugar, el articulo reconstruye los principales pilares de pensamiento de Carl Menger. Se analiza como el pensamiento post-Mengeriano se bifurco en dos conceptos contradictorios en relacion al papel del sistema de creditos; por una parte la teoria de Schumpeter y, por otra, la de Mises. El articulo muestra como Schumpeter distorsiono el pensamiento mengeriano original para explicar los ciclos economicos, mientras que Mises, bajo la influencia de Bohm-Bawerk, descarto algunos supuestos clave de Menger; por ello la ABCT refleja en menor grado los impactos del boom empresarial permitido por la expansion del credito. En la discusion, propongo una reforma de ABCT, basada en la combinacion del marco original mengeriano y las ideas misesianas. Esta reconceptualizacion de ABTC explica por que no se ha producido una fase de hiperinflacion a pesar de la expansion del sistema de creditos de las ulti-mas decadas, y advierte de que el peligro real no es la hiperinflacion sino el surgimiento de un gobierno omnipotente sobre la base de la expansion del sistema de creditos que allane el camino hacia la servidumbre EnglishThe Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT), based on the insights of Bohm-Bawerk and Mises, became one of the core theoretical insights of the Austrian School of Economics.The 2008 crisis seemed to support the ABCT. Nonetheless, the relatively small harm caused by the crisis and the longest economic expansion ever seen refuted warnings about hyperinflation and civilizational collapse. The aim of this paper is to explain the cause of the relative success of the credit expansion monetary system through the reconstruction of the original Men-gerian theoretical framework combined with the Misesian insights.First, the paper reconstructs Carl Menger’s main tenets of thought. The paper dis-cusses how the post-Mengerien development diverged into two conflicting con-cepts concerning the role of credit: the one conceptualized by Schumpeter and the one conceptualized by Mises. The paper shows how Schumpeter distorted the original Mengerian thought in order to explain business cycles, while Mises, under the influence of Bohm-Bawerk, discarded some of Menger’s key assump-tions making ABCT less reflective of the impacts of the entrepreneurial boom allowed by credit expansion. In the discussion, I argue that the reformation of ABCT based on the combination of the original Mengerian framework and the Misesian insights explains both the resilience and success of the credit based monetary system, but also warns that the real danger is the rise of an omnipotent government based on credit expansion that can pave the road to serfdom.

How asset prices should be taken into account in monetary policy is a controversial question in mainstream discussion. These mainstream positions can be differentiated into two broad perspectives: the proactive and the reactive views. The proactive view advocates pricking the asset price bubble, while the reactive view argues against monetary policy targeting asset prices. In this article the relation between asset prices and the Austrian business cycle theory is examined. Following this, a critique of both the proactive and reactive views is provided and implications for monetary policy are deduced. Key words: Austrian Economics, Business Cycles, Asset Prices, Central Banks and their Policies. JEL Classification: B53, E32, E58.

Economists in the tradition of the Austrian school have shown that one type of maturity mismatching can cause maladjustments and business cycles.1 When banks expand credit, by granting loans and creating demand deposits, they generate immediately withdrawable liabilities to finance longer-term loans. The newly created demand deposits do not represent a reduction of consumption, i.e., that characterized by real savings. As a con sequence, in terest rates are artificially reduced under the level they would have been in a free market reflecting real savings and time preference rates.2 Thus, entrepreneurs are prone to engage in more and longer projects than could be financed with the available supply of real savings. Before all projects that are financed by the credit expansion are finished, a bust occurs. An absence of realsavings to sustain the factors of production in the production pro cesses and to produce complementary and necessary capital goods becomes evident. As a result, malinvestments are liquidated and the structure of production is brought in line with consumer preferences again. This is the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) in a nutshell. As a remedy Austrian economists such as Selgin (1988) and White (1999) have argued that a free banking system would be a means to inhibit the excessive credit expansion that causes business cycles. They maintain that the competition between banks would limit the credit expansion of the banking system effectively. Other Austrians such as Rothbard (1991) and Huerta de Soto (2006) have gone further and advocate a 100 percent re - rerve banking system ruling out credit expansion altogether.3 In this article it is argued that a 100 percent reserve system can still bring about artificial booms by maturity mismatching if there is a central bank or government support and guarantees for the ban king system. Even if we accept the case for a 100 percent re - serve requirement, we see that the maturity mismatching of liabilities and assets (borrowing short and lending long) is itself perilous–and in the same sense that fractional reserves are perilous.

The triangle is an integral part of the history of economic thought. It has been used by writers such as Jevons (1871), Taussig (1896), Wicksell (1934, 1969) to illustrate and to help us understand capital theory. Since Hayek (1931) this geometrical figure has been used as a basic pedagogical device to explain the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT). The purpose of the present paper is to argue that the triangle is highly problematic, if not fatally flawed, and that if ABCT is to be made intelligible this tool of analysis must be either completely jettisoned, or heavily supplemented with a list (see below) of its shortcomings. Moreover in some ways the triangle has been responsible for the relative lack of development of ABCT for over a half century. Key words: Austrian economics, business cycle theory, praxeology, economic geometry, triangles. Clasificación JEL: E3, E32. Resumen: El triángulo es una parte integral de la historia del pensamiento económico. Ha sido utilizado por escritores como Jevons (1871), Taussig (1896), Wicksell (1934, 1969) para ilustrar y ayudarnos a comprender la teoría del capital. Desde Hayek (1931) esta figura geométrica se ha utilizado como un instrumento pedagógico básico para explicar la teoría austriaca del ciclo económico. El propósito de este trabajo es sostener que el triángulo es altamente problemático, sino fatalmente defectuoso, por lo que si deseamos que la teoría austriaca del ciclo económico sea comprendida debemos desecharlo comple-tamente, o complementarlo fuertemente con una lista de sus limitaciones. Además, en algunos casos el triángulo ha sido responsable de la relativa falta de desarrollo de la teoría austriaca del ciclo durante un periodo de medio siglo. Palabras clave: Economía austriaca, teoría del ciclo económico, praxeología, geometría económica, triángulos.

In my book «Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles» (1st Spanish Edition 1992, 2nd English Edition 2009) I present a detailed analysis of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory. Now I will concentrate on the financial crisis and the current worldwide economic recession as one of the most challenging problems we must now cope with and the way in which the Austrian Business Cycle Theory can help us to understand its causes and the best approach to economic recovery. Having witnessed the intellectual and practical defeat of socialism specially during the last decades of the twentieth century, in my opinion one of the main challenges that still remains for the future of Capitalism is the urgent need to privatize money by dismantling the organ of central monetary planning: the Central Bank. In other words, real Socialism, represented by state money, Central banks and financial administrative regulations, is still in force in the monetary and credit sectors of the so called free market economies. As a result of this fact we experience regularly in the area of money and credit all the negative consequences established by the Theorem of the Impossibility of Socialism discovered by those distinguished members of the Austrian School of Economics Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Specifically, the central planners of state money are unable to know, to follow and to control the changes in both the demand and supply of money. Furthermore, the whole financial system is based on the legal privilege given by the state to private bankers to act with a fractional reserve ratio in relation with the demand deposits they receive from their clients. As a result of this privilege, private bankers are not true financial intermediaries, but are mainly creators of deposits materializing in credit expansions. These credit expansions are artificial and do not correspond to any previous increases in the voluntary savings of the citizens. In this way the current fractional reserve banking system, tends to worsen and amplify the systemic intertemporal distortions and investment misallocations that the macroeconomic planners working for central banks induce in the production structure of the whole real economy. These distortions manifest themselves in the stages of financial bubbles, economic boom, overall malinvestment and afterwards in the stages of financial crisis, deep economic recession and unemployment.

The 100%-Money plan advocated by Fisher (1936) has a Misesian flavor as it aims at mitigating intertemporal discoordination by reducing (i) the discrepancy between investment and voluntary savings, and (ii) the manipula­ tion of interest rates by monetary injections. Recent proposals to adopt the 100% reserve banking system, such as the Chicago Plan Revisited by Benes and Kumhof (2013) or the Limited Purpose Banking by Kotlikoff (2010), take, however, a fundamentally different attitude towards the role of the central bank in the credit market and ignore that intertemporal discoordination arises inde­ pendently from whether the credit expansion is financed by the creation of outside or inside money. These plans allow the central bank to inject outside money into the credit market and to effectively lower interest rates in negative territory in order to overcome the limit that the liquidity trap sets to credit expan­ sion in the fractional reserve system. Although such an attempt may succeed in stimulating the economy in the short run, it exacerbates intertemporal discoor­ dination and weakens economic stability in the long run. Key words: monetary systems, 100% reserve banking, Chicago Plan, Austrian Business Cycle Theory. JEL Classification: E30, E42, E58, B53. Resumen: El plan «dinero 100%» defendido por Fisher (1936) tiene connotacio­ nes misianas en el sentido en que tiene como objetivo mitigar la descoordinación intertemporal reduciendo (i) la diferencia entre la inversión y el ahorro voluntario y (ii) la manipulación de los tipos de interés a través de inyecciones de dinero. Las recientes propuestas para adoptar un sistema de coficiente de reservas ban­ carias del 100%, tales como el Chicago Plan Revisited de Benes y Kumhof (2013) o el Limited Purpose Banking de Kotlikoff (2010), toman, sin embargo, una actitud esencialmente diferente hacia el papel del banco central en el mercado de cré­ dito, e ignora que la descoordinación intertemporal surge independientemente de si la expansión crediticia se financia mediante la creación de dinero desde dentro (inside money) o fuera (outside money). Estos planes permiten al banco central inyectar dinero desde fuera en el mercado de crédito y reducir los tipos de interés de manera efectiva en valores negativos con el fin de superar el límite que establece la trampa de la liquidez a la expansión del crédito en el sistema de reserva fraccionaria. Aunque tal intento puede tener éxito a la hora de esti­ mular la economía en el corto plazo, acentúa la descoordinación intertemporal y debilita la estabilidad económica a largo plazo. Palabras clave: Sistemas monetarios, banca de reserva del 100%, Plan Chica­ go, teoría austriaca del ciclo económico. Clasificación JEL: E30, E42, E58, B53.

This paper makes four points. First, interest rates are not prices; rather they are metrics. Second, there are no markets for «loanable funds» in reality, so attempts to use «the» market for loanable funds either to explain saving-induced growth (or growth induced in other ways) are misleading. Rather, the appropriate concept is markets for financial assets. Third, the primary and most important source of growth is not households’ low or reduced time preferences, but entrepreneurs high or increased profit expectations. Fourth, financial institutions may respond, in part, to a rise in the monetary base by accepting a higher default risk of their assets; i.e., by making riskier loans and buying riskier (financial) assets, in order to maintain nominal interest rates and net interest margins. Key words: Risk, Loanable funds, Financial assets, Austrian business cycle theory. JEL Classification: E32. Resumen: Este artículo desarrolla una versión modificada de la teoría austriaca del ciclo económico en la que el papel protagonista lo juegan las expectativas de beneficio de los empresarios (más que la reducción de la preferencia temporal de los agentes económicos) y la asunción de proyectos empresariales más arriesgado, como principal detonante de las malas inversiones. Palabras clave: Riesgo, Fondos prestables, Activos financieros, Teoría austriaca del ciclo económico. Clasificación JEL: E32.

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) 2007/2008 the sales of Hayek’s (1944) Road to Serfdom quadrupled, a clear indication of renewed public interest in the views of (neo-) Austrian economists on macro-economic crises, especially financial crises. It is also true that several economists associated with the Austrian school, or those using neo-Austrian insights, correctly predicted the U.S. housing bubble and the subsequent GFC, apparently, a clear vindication of (neo-) Austrian cycle theory (Hunter, 2018). More surprising is that even relatively fierce opponents of neo-Austrian macro-theory have meanwhile begun to accept some Austrian insights. We thus ought to ask, what are the basic tenets of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) and how did it enable some economists to correctly predict the U.S. subprime crisis and its aftermath? In contrast, it is also true that mainstream macro-economists, although struggling heavily to come up with a suitable theoretical explanation of the GFC, neither accept the neo-Austrian explanation of crises, nor its policy implications. Therefore, we also need to ask why mainstream economists dismiss ABCT. Is it the alleged neo-Austrian bias towards the supremacy of an unfettered market economy which is rejected by the mainstream, or is it rather the lack of correspondence between ABCT and the stylized facts of business cycles, such as the positive correlation between consumption and investment? We also need to ascertain to what extent the basic Mises-Hayek cycle theory can be applied to an explanation of the U.S. subprime crisis and the GFC? For example, the neo-Austrian economist Salerno (2012: p. 41) has stated that the unprecedented monetary inventions by the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) and the enormous government deficits run by U.S. administrations since the Great Recession (GR) must at some point lead to a 1970s-style period of stagflation. Why has this failed to materialize? We have currently experienced the longest boom in the U.S. economy since the GR, a boom which has been engineered by anti-Austrian ultra-loose monetary policy. How do neo-Austrian authors manage to cope with such a fact? Such are the research questions dealt with in the following paper. Following an introduction to the main topic, the basic elements of ABCT are presented. Then, neo-Austrian extensions of basic ABCT are applied to an explanation of the U.S. housing bubble and the subsequent GFC. This is followed by discussion of radical neo-Austrian critiques of the unconventional monetary policies used to reflate the U.S. economy after the GR. The main question here is why such policies can continue without producing an economic downturn or bust. The paper concludes with a summary of neo-Austrian views on the GFC and its pre-Corona aftermath.