Ryan W. McMaken
Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power and Market, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has a bachelor's degree in economics and a master's degree in public policy and international relations from the University of Colorado. He was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.
Ryan W. McMaken Articles
There are many reasons for disliking the Federal Reserve, and readers often encounter a wide variety of these reasons in articles and commentary by financial writers and economists. It is often the case, however, that many critics of the...
On Monday’s Episode of the Tucker Carlson Show, Carlson interviewed Catholic Bishop Robert Barron, largely to discuss topics related to the election of Pope Leo XIV. Most of the interview is unremarkable for our purposes here at mises.org...
The US government is on track to borrow more than two trillion dollars this year, but that’s going to require a lot of new loans from investors, and it’s looking like there is limited investor appetite for ever larger amounts of federal...
On Wednesday, the Federal reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee left the target federal funds rate unchanged at 4.25-4.5 percent. The FOMC statement on the current policy, released on Wednesday, reads (my emphases in bold):
For a few days during the early weeks of the current Trump administration, it appeared that the Trump team might actually try to rein in the Federal Reserve. Trump and Elon Musk hinted that they would push for an audit of the Federal...
President Donald Trump last week announced new plans for a $1 trillion defense budget in 2026. Trump bragged about his big plans for spending ever larger amounts of taxpayer funds, stating at a meeting with Israeli President Benjamin...
Money-supply growth rose year over year in February for the seventh month in a row, the first time this has happened since mid-2022. The current trend in money-supply growth suggests a continued reversal of more than a year of historically...
In discussions surrounding of the world’s monetary systems today there is usually one thing almost everyone can agree on: that money should be controlled by the organizations we call “states” or “sovereign states.” Nowadays when we say “...
Rand Paul, Elon Musk, and several others, have recently called for an audit of the US government’s gold holdings. This has reminded many Americans that the US government owns a hoard of gold—of 261 million ounces—at Fort Knox and other...
I’m all in favor of a thorough and public audit of the US’s gold reserves. This includes the gold, not only at Fort Knox, but also at the other gold storage facilities at West Point, Denver, and the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Ron Paul...
