Free Market 17, no. 3 (March 1999) Duality is the Visa and MasterCard management policy that allows banks doing business with one to issue both credit cards. It is a is questioned in court, the Justice Department has announced that duality is “anti-competitive.” It has staked the success of a huge lawsuit against Visa and MasterCard the company was changing its bylaws to prohibit duality. “AmeriCard submits that competition between the two competing bank-card systems must not be lessened and that
worlds that yields the market price. If businesses have been required by virtue of competitive pressure to sell at ever lower prices, how can they make a buck? By is something that businesses do when they have to. A monopolist is facing no competition (think of a government toll road) and so can charge high prices and possible path. But this is precisely what the Fed has endorsed as a matter of policy. It is hardly surprising that the central planners managing our lives would
central banks would abolish financial panics. In fact, they eliminated crucial competitive forces that would otherwise force banks to lend prudently. When trouble wholly private and responsible solely to its depositors’ demand for sound lending policies. Fractional-Reserve Banking . A competitive banking system would constantly face the threat of runs and would
we’re told, are the very foundation of the economy and thus cannot be subject to competitive pressure or to changes in consumer demand. Butchers and bakers can go This agitation led to congressional enactment of more and more centralized policies, culminating in passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. Modeled after Interstate Commerce Commission—the Fed eliminated “cutthroat” banking competition, often denounced as “wildcat banking.” This way the larger more
to the greenback at undervalued rates. Mean currency values keep Asia’s exports competitive, supporting the rapid growth that underpins its economic success. At the fall in the dollar than what has already occurred thus far. The downside of this policy is that as Asian central banks purchase dollars and dollar-denominated debt the last leg out from under the dollar? Besides incurring a diminution in export competitiveness, the latter option threatens to wipe billions of dollars off Asian
every country: the government provides protection for the banking industry against competition, in exchange for which the banking industry agrees to act as the money to prevent deflation and kick start lackluster global growth, including unorthodox policies such as buying up financial assets.” And with whose money will these banks
Government, aided and abetted by its host of apologists among intellectuals and policy wonks, likes to regard itself as a deus ex machina (a “god out of the is an inevitable downside: namely, that import prices are higher, whch removes competition that will keep domestic prices down. Instead of learning the lesson that
of thin air. They all want, as Banker magazine noted, “a world in which national policy authority is greatly reduced, and replaced by more powerful international policy-making bodies.” Finance Minister Edouard Balladur of France writes in the Wall (One free-market publication praised the Ecu as “an extension of Hayek’s work on competitive currency.”) None of this is to say that I approve of the status quo. The
Congressional, Cabinet, and White House staffers; Members of Congress; public policy advisors; journalists, scholars, students, and business people. 212 people Standard?’ Only a gold standard, he showed, is compatible with non-inflationary, competitive, consumer-oriented, free-enterprise banking. There followed a panel he said, correctly foresaw in the 1890s how incorrect monetary and economic policies would lead Europe into a disastrous war, a war which would destroy the
read a financial analyst who actually used the term “Goldilocks” in describing Fed policy.) A good central banker knows when to cut rates to jump-start the economy out government subsidy, the housing industry would be more profitable than before, and competition among builders would eventually lead to a fall in housing prices for
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The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.