Explaining Malinvestment and Overinvestment

by Larry J. Sechrest
Mises.org

Mainstream macroeconomists may—and do—disagree with such an assessment, but Austrian macroeconomists rightly consider the Misesian/Hayekian theory of the business cycle to be one of the signal achievements of the entire Austrian School of thought. This Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT) offers a unique perspective on the destructive array of private sector incentives created by central bank manipulations of the supplies of money and credit ABCT is essentially a theory of unsustainable economic expansions, that is, macroeconomic expansions that must unavoidably be followed at some point by macroeconomic contractions. At the center of this scenario is the phenomenon of malinvestment. Thus, in order to explain ABCT one must be able to convey in what malinvestment consists. In the past, Austrians have usually done this either entirely by means of verbal explication or with the assistance of certain unconventional constructions such as Hayekian triangles.

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