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.
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.
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.
Latest from the Forum
All essays →The Saleability of Human Hours: Labor, AI, and the Mengerian Inversion Already Underway
The April 2026 jobs report looked healthy on the surface: 115,000 jobs added, unemployment steady at 4.3%, with monthly job growth averaging 76,000 across the year so far against the anemic 10,000 monthly average of 2025. Underneath the aggregate, the composition is shifting in ways the headline number cannot capture. Tech-sector layoffs reached 45,000 in Q1 2026 alone, with approximately 20% explicitly attributed to AI substitution — a share rising quarter over quarter. Healthcare, transportation, warehousing, and skilled trades grew. Ford CEO Jim Farley reported 5,000 open mechanic positions his company cannot fill at salaries reaching $120,000. Data-center electricians are earning $280,000 and the construction sector is short 349,000 workers in 2026 alone. The framework's reading: this is not a labor market in cyclical adjustment. It is the Mengerian saleability spectrum of human labor being structurally reordered in real time, with white-collar work AI can substitute losing saleability while physical work AI cannot perform gains it. The aggregate "labor market" is the wrong unit of analysis. This essay applies Menger's six saleability criteria to labor itself, engages Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's "white-collar bloodbath" prediction directly, and traces what the inversion means for households navigating it.
Extend, Pretend, Foreclose: The Commercial Real Estate Collapse the Framework Predicted Is Operationally Here
Through the first five months of 2026, a Chicago office building changed hands at a 94% loss from its decade-prior value, a Denver complex at 97%, eight floors of a Mid-Market San Francisco tower at 92%, the former GSA building in Washington DC at 76%. Worldwide Plaza in Manhattan ($940M loan), One New York Plaza ($835M), Pittsburgh's U.S. Steel Tower ($245M), and the former New York Times Building at 620 Eighth Avenue ($515M, five extensions) sit in special servicing or modification rather than enter the same fire-sale market. CMBS office delinquency hit 12.34% in January — the all-time high — then "dropped" 114 basis points in February because lenders modified five large office loans and four large mall loans, extending some maturities up to three years. This is what extend-and-pretend looks like in the data series itself. This is what the catalog's housing-and-banking arc has been predicting since Article 16. The collapse is operationally here. The framework's reading: the cascade now visible in named properties will not be contained to commercial real estate, because the regional banking sector that holds approximately 70% of CRE loans cannot absorb the eventual losses through balance sheet alone.
The Lag: What Hormuz Will Cost the American Household, and When
Supply shocks propagate to consumer prices on calendar time, not news-cycle time. The quantitative easing rounds of 2008-2014 took two to three years to produce their peak consumer price effect. The post-COVID monetary expansion took eighteen to twenty-four months. The Strait of Hormuz disruption that began on February 28, 2026 is a structurally different shock — supply-side rather than monetary — but the calendar mechanics of how it reaches the American household are similar in form and timing. This essay traces the propagation channel by channel, anchors each in empirical pass-through estimates from the academic literature, accounts for the strategic reserve buffers that are masking the early-stage impact, and produces specific framework predictions for what the American household should expect over the next 24 months. The calendar math says peak household impact arrives in Q1-Q2 2027, regardless of when the disruption itself resolves.