Dr. Mark Thornton presents Hayek's "Choice in Currency," which diagnoses inflation as an ancient superstition revived by Keynes and proposes a radical remedy — letting people freely choose their money — now finding modern expression in cryptocurrency and the return to gold.
Without established exchange-ratios between a currency and goods, a fiat-token cannot meaningfully serve as a unit of account because it has no referent. The only way a state could meaningfully ground such a fiat-token by political decree would be through comprehensive price controls.
Without established exchange-ratios between a currency and goods, a fiat-token cannot meaningfully serve as a unit of account because it has no referent. The only way a state could meaningfully ground such a fiat-token by political decree would be through comprehensive price controls.
Before the Federal Reserve, before the greenback, American writers were already designing a managed national paper currency, and arguing it could be more stable than gold.
Four western states answered the shortage of money by printing their own, and watched it depreciate in their hands.
Modern monetary theory is an idea and an inchoate theory that lacks serious defenders.
Mark Thornton uses Austrian theory to explain where money came from — Menger's bottom-up origin of money — and why gold makes for sound money and smaller government.
Ryan, Tho, and Dr. Jonathan Newman discuss recent economics headlines, including interventions to prop up the yen, a bad jobs report, and troubling signs in bond markets.
Bob returns to the fractional reserve banking debate to clarify a point the critics keep missing: in the Mises-Hayek-Rothbard framework, it's fractional reserve banking itself that sets the boom-bust cycle in motion, not merely central banks.
Mainstream economists tend to think of cash balances as the heart of new savings. Actually, real savings involves much more than that.
