Money and Banking
Et Tu, Helvetia?
Soon you will no longer be able to purchase Switzerland’s finest watches for cash.
Six Myths About Money and Inflation
Politicians and the mainstream media have faith in the central banks to manipulate and manage the global economy.
The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis, by Ben S. Bernanke
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.
The Savings and Loan Debacle Twenty-Five Years Later: A Misesian Re-Examination and Final Closing of the Book
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.
Confusing Capitalism with Fractional Reserve Banking
Low interest rates combined with high-risk fractional reserve banking creates a powder keg on which we’re sitting today, writes Frank Hollenbeck.
Mercantilism Never Went Away
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
From Monetary Nationalism to Monetary Imperialism: Fractional Reserve Banking and Inter-Government Cooperation
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,
A Simple Model of the Theory of Money Prices
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.
The Role of Fractional-Reserve Banking and Financial Intermediation in the Money Supply Process: Keynes and the Austrians
This article presents two alternative interpretations of the role of banks in the monetary transmission process. The interpretation based on the work of Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard leads to the conclusion that central banking and monetary policy are "generators of the business cycle." The other interpretation presents a Keynesian theory minus the liquidity preference theory of the rate of interest.