Money and Banking

Even when a boom is obvious, it is still in the interests of individual owners and consumers to keep it going.

In a recent exchange with Janet Yellen, Senator Ted Cruz blamed the Fed for being too "tight" with monetary policy, thus causing the financial crisis of 2008. Cruz is right that the Fed was at fault, but he's wrong about how.

ZIRP has created massive asset bubbles throughout the world economy, but also has a diabolical impact on ordinary people who are largely disconnected to the bubbles.

Central bankers would have us believe that creating money “out of thin air” is no problem as long as the “demand for money” increases. They also claim that gold-backed money is more prone to booms and busts. But they’re wrong on both counts.

In this audio book, Rothbard shows precisely how banks create money out of thin air and how the central bank, backed by government power, allows them to get away with it.

Opponents of austerity have come out to denounce the idea that it’s bad for governments to borrow. They note that there are benefits to borrowing. The distinction they fail to make is that there’s a big difference between private borrowing and government borrowing.

Government failure was being felt everywhere this week, from the massive law-enforcement failure in Sen Bernardino to the crumbling economy in Brazil. Meanwhile, government tells us it only needs a little more money, power, and time to solve all problems.

Fractional-reserve banking systems create money out of thin air, and this causes malinvestments into less valuable and less productive activities. Eventually, banks realize there's trouble ahead, so they cut back on loans which leads to deflation and crisis.

The 'good' news this holiday season comes from the IMF, as the Fund decided yesterday to include the yuan in the basket of currencies which underpins its Special Drawing Rights (SDR).

The continuing power of the US dollar was called into question this week as the International Monetary Fund added the Chinese yuan as a part of the IMF's "currency" known as Special Drawing Rights. What does this mean for the US and China?