Money and Banks

ZIRP has created massive asset bubbles throughout the world economy, but also has a diabolical impact on ordinary people who are largely disconnected to the bubbles.

Central bankers would have us believe that creating money “out of thin air” is no problem as long as the “demand for money” increases. They also claim that gold-backed money is more prone to booms and busts. But they’re wrong on both counts.

In this audio book, Rothbard shows precisely how banks create money out of thin air and how the central bank, backed by government power, allows them to get away with it.

Opponents of austerity have come out to denounce the idea that it’s bad for governments to borrow. They note that there are benefits to borrowing. The distinction they fail to make is that there’s a big difference between private borrowing and government borrowing.

Government failure was being felt everywhere this week, from the massive law-enforcement failure in Sen Bernardino to the crumbling economy in Brazil. Meanwhile, government tells us it only needs a little more money, power, and time to solve all problems.

Fractional-reserve banking systems create money out of thin air, and this causes malinvestments into less valuable and less productive activities. Eventually, banks realize there's trouble ahead, so they cut back on loans which leads to deflation and crisis.

Republicans and conservative think tanks are apparently convinced that the key to improving the Federal Reserve is to create a "rules-based" monetary policy. But, as is so often the case with economics, things are much more complicated than they seem.

There were many state and local elections in the US this week, but few of them will result in anything that will combat widely held and popular errors about central banking, drug prohibition, and the global environment.

Given the current state of the economy, the Fed appears quite unlikely to raise interest rates any time soon. But what will it do if the economy starts to really go south?

Historically, reserve currencies have arisen without the help of the IMF, but we’re now witnessing a situation in which the IMF may declare the Chinese yuan a “reserve currency” as part of a larger game by global elites to manipulate global exchange rates.