Money and Banks

Austrian economists have been wrongly accused of many intellectual crimes when it comes to fractional reserve banking.

It’s difficult to envisage a downward-sloping yield curve in an unhampered market economy since this would imply that investors are assigning a higher risk to short-term maturities than long-term maturities. But in today’s economy, an upward or a downward sloping yield curve reflects the Fed’s interest rate policies.

US sanctions against Russia are just the latest incentive for the world’s economies to avoid dealing with the dollar, writes Ron Paul.

The reality is that hyperinflation is caused by a loss of confidence in the money unit, which the monetary authorities may be incapable of preventing.

There is trouble lurking in each of the book’s four chapters. The text gets off on a wrong foot as Bernanke overviews the origins and purposes of the Fed.

August 9, 2014 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the signing into law of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) of 1989 by U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush. FIRREA was enacted to clean up the savings and loan (S&L) financial debacle of the 1980s. In articles, books, symposia, and papers written in the wake of the debacle, popular media and mainstream financial economists each provided explanations of the debacle. This paper analyzes and rejects these explanations in favor of an alternative based on Ludwig von Mises’s observation that market interventions create unintended consequences that usually lead to more interventions that in turn create new waves of unintended and worsening consequences until no more interventions are possible.

The debate over the Export-Import Bank continues, with the bank’s friends in Congress and other high places claiming that the Bank serves an

Using McDonals’s Big Mac as the standard, the US Dollar looks relative firm compared to some other currencies.

This article has a twofold purpose. Its first goal is to pay tribute to Friedrich von Hayek as an outstanding monetary theorist. Its second objective is to further elaborate, on the ground of Hayek’s main findings,