Money and Banks

From The Review of Austrian Economics Vol. 2, 1988.

Decisively refuted by the facts of economic life, Marxism has been forced to retreat to the one place in the academy where empirical reality seems to carry no weight in an argument: the humanities departments.

Yuri Kuznetsov suggests a scenario by which fiat money comes about, a scenario which may be useful for understanding some events in recent Russian history.

Recorded at Mises University 2004.

Recorded at Mises University 2004.

Recorded at Mises University 2004.

Recorded at Mises University 2004.

Modern monetary systems operate on the ability to turn debt into money.

The mythology of gold really grew up with Keynes and the quantity theory. Here are six of those myths: the gold standard is unable to accommodate the needs of an growing economy; the quantity of money is arbitrarily determined; the gold standard is a government price fixing scheme; the gold standard subjects a country to alternating inflation and deflation; the gold standard requires high costs devoted to resources; and the gold standard results in high interest rates.

Friedman’s book, Monetary History of the United States, tried to show the depression was caused by a deflation of the money supply by the Fed. Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression was published the next year in 1963. Rothbard argued that the Fed was actively inflating the money supply.