It used to be that central banks were constrained in setting monetary policy by the zero lower bound. Nominal interest rates cannot fall below zero because people would just hold cash under their mattresses instead.
Of course, if the existence of cash is getting in the way of monetary policy why not just eliminate cash completely?
The Swedish government abetted by its fractional-reserve banking system is moving relentlessly toward a completely cashless economy.
As soon as I was publicly listed as an instructor for a large principles-level economics course for the Spring semester, textbook companies and their sales representatives circled and descended on me like a pack of Mises University students on Walter Block’s trail.
In his book Liberalism, Ludwig von Mises wrote “The minority that desires to see its ideas strive by intellectual means to become the majority.”
In America today, there is probably no smaller – nor more vilified – minority group than those who genuinely desire to see America become a truly liberalized, capitalist society.
WASHINGTON — The Federal Underwear Reserve Board wants to make sure that investors, employers, workers and consumers understand that it could raise its benchmark underwear price in December; it just is not ready to make any promises yet.
Scarcity of resources exists in many forms and is the problem in economics. If resources were not scarce, there would be no need to economize. The existence of scarcity is true of all resources (such as time, human energy, and natural resources). However, it is not necessarily intuitive that allowing scarce resources to be owned privately is the solution to this problem.
The Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee released a brief statement on its decision to not raise the federal funds rate. The committee’s basic analysis and conclusions are unchanged from numerous previous statements of this kind. The language sounds very familiar. For example:
Editor’s Note: Interest rates and inflation are certainly connected to efforts on the parts of central banks to loosen and tighten the money supply. These relationships, however, are much more complex than many people suppose. As we’ve seen in recent weeks, with constant talk about what the Fed will do next, expectations are an important factor in how markets respond to central bank actions.
In the spring of 1990, after the fall of Ceausescu’s communist regime, the first free elections took place in Romania. The election day coincided with the the sixth Sunday after Orthodox Easter, when the story of the healing of a man born blind from birth—from the Gospel of Apostle John—is read in Church. But that day in 1990 no miracle took place, and no one ‘came away seeing’.
