Money & Banking

The stories are all over the Internet. Governments are forcing us into a cashless society. Supposedly the pretext is terrorism, and the real reason is to take more control.

Fed apologists argue that the economy would be even more unstable, if we had no monetary central planner. However, the fact is that it became a lot less stable after the Fed was created.

The biggest deflation in the history of the country came after the Fed was founded, and that deflation contributed to the Great Depression of the 1930s. As for bank failures, they reached levels unheard of before there was a Federal Reserve System.

It isn’t clear that the Fed has brought any substantial improvement in macroeconomic stability.

Our monetary system is failing, but explaining that isn’t easy.

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Harold Meyerson, an avowed socialist, compares corporations who buy back their own shares to Las Vegas mafia bosses who used to skim casino profits.  The basis for his smear is "a recent paper by J.W. Mason, an economist at the City...

The Fed is a large and aloof agency that needs to be tamed.

Central banking requires that government bureaucrats act in a way to distort the entire economic system by introducing counterfeit credit into the monetary system in such a way that businessmen are continually fooled into acting in a way that mimics the behavior of businessmen operating in an actual economic boom.

The gold tax is the key to socialized money. We can never have a free market in money if gold is penalized with a tax every time the dollar loses value.

The coming destruction has nothing to do with the quantity of money. It is a story of what happens when interest rates fall into a black hole.

The situation that forced the Swiss to abandon the peg will soon be faced by bankers of much larger countries in the coming years, the implications of which can have more profound implications for global financial markets.

The U.S. was able to recover relatively quickly from at least one deep slump despite authorities’ refusal to resort to either fiscal or monetary stimulus.

While I’m all for monetary freedom and competition, I’m also for reforming the U.S. dollar, which for me means freeing it from control by discretionary central bankers.

If even economists who’ve never heard of free banking, or who dismiss both it and the people who take it seriously, nevertheless subscribe to some free banking theories of their own, where do their theories come from?

While other countries were undermined by the promises politicians made with a printing press, the Swiss economy prospered thanks to the discipline provided by gold.

Central planners constantly run into the problem that people are not willing cogs.

Inflation is not needed to grow economies but to grow governments.

History shows that, whenever financial institutions, whether domestic or global, have been allowed to develop freely, the results have been far more satisfactory than those from government-designed schemes.

William Jennings Bryan, the most stalwart enemy of both private currency and currency monopoly since Andrew Jackson, helped to create a currency monopoly far more powerful than any that Jackson could ever have envisaged, and far more capable of gratifying Wall Street, at the expense of the rest of the nation, than Wall Street alone, left perfectly free from government controls, could ever have devised.

Why did the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy of price level stabilization in the 1920s result in the Great Depression of the early 1930s?