New Austrian Economics
The tradition that explains what others can't.
Rooted in Carl Menger's foundations. Extended by Antal Fekete's applied monetary theory. Rigorous, visual, and actionable.
Live Readings
Dashboard →Headline values from the framework's primary instruments. Refreshed every 15 minutes.
Latest from the Forum
All essays →The Term Is the Variable: Two Countries, One Rate Structure, and Where the Stress Lands
Court-ordered property listings across Greater Vancouver and the Fraser Valley reached 946 between January and September of 2026, a ten-year high, against 773 for all of 2025 and an annual average roughly one third that level between 2017 and 2022. The conventional reading is that Canadian housing is cracking while the United States holds up. The data does not support that reading. American foreclosure inventory also reached a six-year high in 2026, filings rose fifteen percent year over year, and forty states recorded higher delinquency rates. Both markets are under stress from the same rising interest-rate structure. What differs is where the stress lands, and the difference is almost entirely explained by one contractual feature. In Canada the stress has moved up-market: the president of the firm compiling the listing data says that properties in West Vancouver and Vancouver's West Side were not the ones being foreclosed in the previous cycle, and now are. In the United States it has sorted by credit quality instead: within the Mortgage Bankers Association's survey, FHA-insured mortgages carry a delinquency rate of 11.79 percent against 2.72 percent for conventional loans, a ratio of better than four to one. A five-year Canadian term forces every borrower to reprice regardless of quality, so the stress follows balance size. A thirty-year American fixed insulates every borrower from repricing, so only those marginal at origination break. And the lock-in effect now freezing American inventory is, this essay argues, Fekete's Law of Liabilities being priced by millions of households that no accounting standard requires to record it.
The Category That Was Removed: Scoring the Airline Cluster Six Months On
Article 35 of this catalog was published on July 5, 2026, two months after Spirit Airlines liquidated and while the failure cluster was still accumulating. It made one central causal claim — that the Hormuz lag documented in Article 26 had arrived at the airline profit and loss statement, and that fuel was the mechanism converting a sector of chronically thin-margin operators into a sequence of insolvencies. Six months later that reading is the consensus explanation, stated in the trade coverage without qualification, and this essay scores it as such rather than leaving it assumed. At least eight further carriers have failed since, including Flybondi, the second-largest airline in Argentina, which suspended all operations in August and filed for creditor protection in October against liabilities of roughly 120 million dollars. But the more consequential development is structural rather than additive. The cluster did not merely remove firms. It removed a competitive category. Five low-cost carriers now remain in the United States, Southwest and JetBlue have both migrated to hybrid models, and industry observers report that legacy carriers learned from Spirit's collapse how to fend off the segment entirely — a pattern with a direct precedent in Delta's Song and United's Ted, both of which died within several years of an earlier fuel spike. This essay argues that the sorting mechanism is the same one Article 62 identified in two national housing markets: exposure to a cost shock is determined by the duration of the obligation that absorbs it. For a household that is the mortgage term. For an airline it is the fuel hedge. The carriers that died were the ones whose input costs repriced continuously, which is a structural property of the ultra-low-cost model rather than a failure of management.
The Protection That Dissolved: United States v. Miller and the Constitutional Precondition for Programmable Money
On April 21, 1976, the Supreme Court held seven to two that a bank depositor has no Fourth Amendment interest in his own financial records. The reasoning was that checks, deposit slips and account statements are the business records of the bank rather than the depositor's private papers, and that information voluntarily conveyed to a third party loses its constitutional protection even when revealed on the assumption it would be used only for a limited purpose. Justice Brennan dissented on the ground that banking is functionally obligatory in modern commerce and that a conveyance one cannot avoid is not voluntary. He lost. United States v. Miller became the origin of what is now called the third-party doctrine, extended to telephone records three years later and standing as the constitutional foundation for the government's access to essentially all intermediated transactional information. This essay traces the decision from the Bank Secrecy Act that produced the records through California Bankers v. Shultz, Miller itself, Smith v. Maryland, and the partial qualification in Carpenter v. United States — and argues that Miller is the unexamined precondition for the architecture this catalog has documented across its work on programmable money. If financial records held by intermediaries carry no constitutional protection, and a cashless system makes every transaction intermediated, then no financial act is constitutionally private, and nothing had to be repealed to reach that result.
First Principles
The three axioms and the working definitions — the foundational layer everything else builds on.
The Library
Visual dissections of the foundational texts — concept maps, argument flows, and actionable takeaways.
The Atlas
Interactive deep-dive concept pages — the 3Blue1Brown of Austrian economics.
The Dispatch
Weekly analysis — current events through the New Austrian lens.
The Forum
Original essays, applied analysis, and critical commentary.
The Diagrams
A visual index of every original diagram on the site — Atlas concepts, Forum essays, and the Human Action chapter set.
Framework Scorecard
Timestamped predictions made in public, scored as evidence resolves — the falsifiability ledger.
The Fekete Archive
The complete, searchable, web-native repository of Professor Antal Fekete's published work.
The Toolkit
Live market tools that operationalize New Austrian theory — Gold Basis Monitor, yield curves, and more.
Charts
Shareable, server-rendered chart permalinks for every Toolkit instrument — the unfurl is the chart itself.
About
The mission, the lineage, and the tradition this site serves.