Money and Banking

Soon you will no longer be able to purchase Switzerland’s finest watches for cash.

Politicians and the mainstream media have faith in the central banks to manipulate and manage the global economy.

There is trouble lurking in each of the book’s four chapters. The text gets off on a wrong foot as Bernanke overviews the origins and purposes of the Fed.

August 9, 2014 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the signing into law of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) of 1989 by U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush. FIRREA was enacted to clean up the savings and loan (S&L) financial debacle of the 1980s. In articles, books, symposia, and papers written in the wake of the debacle, popular media and mainstream financial economists each provided explanations of the debacle. This paper analyzes and rejects these explanations in favor of an alternative based on Ludwig von Mises’s observation that market interventions create unintended consequences that usually lead to more interventions that in turn create new waves of unintended and worsening consequences until no more interventions are possible.

Low interest rates combined with high-risk fractional reserve banking creates a powder keg on which we’re sitting today, writes Frank Hollenbeck.

The debate over the Export-Import Bank continues, with the bank’s friends in Congress and other high places claiming that the Bank serves an

Ludwig von Mises (1981; 1998) is generally and properly credited by contemporary Austrians with having reintegrated monetary theory with general economic theory from which it had been severed by the neoclassical quantity theory.

This article has a twofold purpose. Its first goal is to pay tribute to Friedrich von Hayek as an outstanding monetary theorist. Its second objective is to further elaborate, on the ground of Hayek’s main findings,

The article by Jörg Guido Hülsmann, “Free Banking and the Free Bankers,” is an important contribution to a proper understanding of free-banking systems. He is perfectly correct in blaming some advocates of free banking who support arguments which are irrelevant or wrong,