Booms and Busts

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.

By convincing Congress to permit the government to take equity positions in private firms, Donald Trump has completed the transition of the economy from free markets to political capitalism.

The natural tendency of the state is inflation.

Bob reviews Murray Rothbard's 1988 essay "The Myth of Free Banking in Scotland," his sharp response to Larry White's influential account of Scottish free banking.

In this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan sits down with Mark Thornton to talk through the economic trends fueling today's unrest.