The standard interpretation of the Panic of 1837 and subsequent recession blamed state bank monetary inflation abetted by President Jackson’s removal of the federal deposits from the Bank of the United States. This interpretation was rooted in sound economic analysis by contemporary Jeffersonian and hard-money critics of Jackson such as Nathan Appleton (the Massachusetts’ conservative textile manufacturer and banker), Albert Gallatin (Jefferson’s treasury secretary and now a New York banker) and Condy Raguet (the Philadelphia political economist and free-trade leader).

I was a guest on Power Trading Radio with John O’Donnell yesterday. HT to Mark Thornton. O’Donnell gives a nice plug to the Mises Institute at the end of the interview.

FDR famously said that government debt doesn’t matter, because “we owe it to ourselves.” In that case, Butler Shaffer helpfully asks, what’s the harm in default? We’re simply repudiating our obligations to ourselves.

Of course, default isn’t so bad even from a purely economic point of view.

Clueless ‘MarketWatch’ Columnist Disses Austrian Economics

Robert Wenzel shows top to bottom, Delamaide is clueless on facts and theory about deficits, business cycle theory and basic economics. Here is an example of Delamaide’s “analysis.”

WSJ Marketwatch’s Darrell Delamaide worries about the Misesian takeover:

At the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in San Diego (January 4–6, 2013), Harvard professor of economics Benjamin Friedman said,

The standard models we teach … simply have no room in them for what most of the world’s central banks have done in response to the crisis.

Friedman also advises sweeping aside the importance of the role of monetary aggregates. On this he said,

If the model you are teaching has an “M” in it, it is a waste of students’ time. Delete it.

To say that we need a politically created monopoly to create money is to in principle abandon the whole case for the free market and concede the value of central planning.

Abstract:

Gold Switzerland interviews Robert Blumen. It include an interesting discussion on China, socialist calculation, as well as the gold market.