Booms and Busts

Federal Reserve policy has been to expand credit out of nothing without regard for the real damage it does to the economy.

The familiar story pits western farmer-debtors against eastern merchant-creditors. Rothbard's evidence says the story is wrong.

Years before the English currency school made it famous, Americans were arguing for one hundred percent reserves, and some wanted banking abolished outright.

They borrowed when prices were high and had to repay when prices were low. Should the legislature rescue them, or would rescue only deepen the ruin?

A wartime boom, a flood of bank paper, a speculative rush for western land, and then the reckoning.

America's first great depression arrived without a villain: no embargo, no war, no single blundering minister to blame. It seemed to rise out of the economy itself.

Federal Reserve policy has been to expand credit out of nothing without regard for the real damage it does to the economy.

Keynesian theory says that the way to end a recession in which the economy is in a “liquidity trap” is for government to ramp up spending. Murray Rothbard demonstrated that this policy actually blocks an economic recovery.

Kevin Duffy reads gold's bull market through an Austrian investor's lens — America's "imperial bubble" and the gold demand driving it from a rising East.

Bob returns to the fractional reserve banking debate to clarify a point the critics keep missing: in the Mises-Hayek-Rothbard framework, it's fractional reserve banking itself that sets the boom-bust cycle in motion, not merely central banks.