The Fed

As a developer, I do not hire an employee before I have conceived of a construction activity that will earn me a decent return. I hire an employee when I have a productive need for his services.

Fiat money — or, to be more precise, its production — is already a violation of the free-market principle; and fractional-reserve banking amounts to leveraging the economic consequences of fiat money. Austrians favor a money that is freely chosen and operates by market principles.

Just before the beginning of the crisis, work produced by a variety of leading economists was very positive on the state of macroeconomics; it concluded that the field had made big advances in the last decades. A sample of their comments is offered below.

Jim Manzi has been challenging mainstream economists to defend their models, which tout the benefits of fiscal and monetary "stimulus." Manzi has repeatedly asked why he should put any faith in the predictions of these models.

Conservative Republicans are justified in switching their allegiance to the Austrian economists, because supply-side monetarists have a glaring blind spot when it comes to the Federal Reserve.

If the Fed had been tracking repos in 2007–2008, what they would have seen was the unfolding of the financial crisis one full year before it went critical. Instead, Bernanke stopped collecting the data because he decided to abolish M3.

The claim that monetary policy has nothing to do with inflation is nothing new. The Conference Board said the same thing in 1957, and here is Henry Hazlitt's response — from his Crisis and How to Resolve It — to the notion that it is not money expansion but costs of business that is pushing prices.

The strength of Whalen's book is that his monetary history, like Rothbard's, is about people, not policies. While Keynesians talk about unknowable constructs like aggregate demand, Whalen's story turns on the actions of people.

Beginning in 2007 and culminating in 2008, the home-ownership myth was smashed, as values all over the country plummeted, wiping out a primary means of savings and instilling shock and awe all across the country. The thing that was never supposed to happen had happened.

Many academic economists are beginning to worry: Could the Federal Reserve itself become insolvent? In this article I'll explain these fears and I'll argue that the Fed, with its printing press, cannot really go bankrupt the way other corporations can.