The school today

A tradition is not a monument. This course is about what the school looks like now: who disagrees with whom inside it, what became explicit when somebody drew the theory as a model, and where its claims run into data that other people collect.

Seven lessons. The first is the division between a Misesian strand and a Hayekian one, which is real, is argued in print, and changes what the calculation debate is taken to have been about. The second is Garrison's formalisation, and what a formal model costs a theory that spent decades resisting them. The third treats free banking as a research programme, and uses an argument inside the school about one historical episode to show how hard that kind of test is.

The middle two are the reason this course matters to a reader of company accounts. One is about ideas from this tradition that turn up in mainstream work under other names. The other is the financial cycle as the Bank for International Settlements measures it: credit and property prices, a cycle about sixteen years long, and peaks that sit close to crises.

The sixth takes the argument about policy rates in the 2000s, computed from published rates by a mainstream economist, and the seventh asks the question this whole track has been building toward: what evidence would change the school's mind, and whether any would.

Nothing here is a policy position, a forecast, or a view about any security. ValueScreener is a research tool, and this academy is free to read without an account.