Money and Banking

Recorded at Mises University 2003.

Recorded at the 2003 Supporters Summit: Prosperty, War, and Depression.

(24:29)

Recorded at the 2003 Supporters Summit: Prosperty, War, and Depression.

(25:00)

One of the most difficult things to understand about banking is how money is created out of thin air.  Current commercial bank liabilities are immediate. The banks do not have the reserves to redeem all demand notes. Thus, banks are inherently insolvent. But, government has eliminated runs on banks. Banks are not allowed to fail when they are mismanaged.

Professor Roger Garrison discusses Time and Money at the 2002 Austrian Scholars Conference.

Recorded at Mises University 2001.

Recorded at Mises University 2003.

Before there was the Federal Reserve there was the second Bank of the United States (1817–1836). Since the late nineteenth century, historians and economists have lauded this institution for its salutary control over the currency, its regulation of the state banks, its prudent stewardship of the government’s funds, and its example of a fruitful private/public partnership in the field of central banking.

There is a fly in the ointment of economic recovery: a dollar that just won’t seem to stop its fall. The impression that this trend portends something ominous is bolstered by the inverse relationship of the dollar’s value on international exchange and the price of gold. As the dollar has fallen in the last year, gold has risen.

Though politics may yet trump sound economics on this issue, writes Sean Corrigan, the Europeans know they are being blackmailed by the US into pursuing dangerously loose monetary policy (to add to the loose fiscal policies already being practiced by some of their governments). The biggest global spendthrift—usually the US—always expects his creditors to cut their own pockets so he can settle his bills with the coins falling out of them.