The Forum
Personal essays, original analysis, and opinion pieces. Longer-form, evergreen intellectual contributions and original arguments within the New Austrian framework.
New Austrian Economics
Why Gold Didn't Spike: A Fekete Diagnosis of the Iran War
During the 2026 Iran war, gold traded flat and central banks became net sellers. Standard gold-bug frameworks cannot explain this. Antal Fekete's backwardation framework predicted exactly this pattern twenty years ago.
The Hormuz Yuan Toll: A Spontaneous Mengerian Event
Iran charging yuan tolls at Hormuz during wartime, India settling oil in dirhams, Saudi Arabia quietly letting the petrodollar arrangement lapse — these are not geopolitical conspiracies. They are textbook Mengerian monetary evolution, happening in real time.
The Decay Function of Marketability: Toward a Computable Menger-Fekete Framework
Menger argued that saleability is a spectrum; Fekete developed the gold basis to measure it for one commodity. This essay proposes a generalizable decay function of marketability, measurable across every modern financial instrument, that renders Menger's core insight computable for the first time.
Open Market Operations at Light Speed: How AI Converted Fekete's 1922 Warning into a Closed-Loop Capital Destruction Engine
Fekete argued that the illegal introduction of open market operations in 1922 made bond speculation risk-free and destabilized the interest-rate structure. AI-driven algorithmic trading has automated this mechanism and accelerated it to the physical limits of latency. The predicted consequence — systemic capital destruction — is no longer theoretical.
AI Compute as Nascent Real Bills: A Clearing Instrument for the Machine Economy
Fekete's most misunderstood idea — the Real Bills Doctrine — described how the 18th-century commercial economy spontaneously developed a short-duration, self-liquidating clearing instrument for goods in transit to the consumer. The 21st-century compute economy is developing the same thing, and no one is calling it what it is.
The Cryptographic Marketability Premium: How Frontier AI Labs Became the De Facto Issuers of the Digital Trust Layer
The saleability of every digital financial claim in 2026 depends on a cryptographic substrate that is approaching two simultaneous threats: the arrival of cryptographically relevant quantum computing, and the asymmetric deployment of frontier AI for vulnerability discovery. The institutions that control the solution have become a new kind of monetary authority — operating entirely outside the Federal Reserve Act framework, and largely without the awareness of those they effectively govern.
Monetary Power to the People
Money is a medium in McLuhan's sense — an extension of the human body that amplifies the capacity for exchange. Understanding this is the critical path to navigating the financial disruptions of the present age.
Sound Money in Practice: Auckland, 2011
A week with Antal Fekete and the New Austrian School of Economics in Auckland. The three-legged gold standard, illicit interest arbitrage, gold bonds as a path out of irredeemable debt, and why the unadulterated gold standard is defined not by what it contains but by what it prohibits.
The Vanishing Gold Basis: Field Notes from Canberra, 2009
Four days with Antal Fekete and the Gold Standard Institute in Canberra, eighteen months after Lehman. The gold basis as monetary thermometer, the mechanics of permanent backwardation, and why falling interest rates destroy capital in ways that no one in the financial press was discussing.