Money & Banking

You can stretch a rubber band only so far, until it breaks. Our debt will wreck our children’s lives.

Judy Shelton is a high-class, high-quality economist, who should join the Fed not so much to burnish its image but to keep it at least a little bit honest and real. The Fed today doesn’t really deserve Shelton, but Shelton deserves a top place at the Fed.

Perhaps the money of the future isn’t some sophisticated crypto token, but a private promise to consume a widely used service. 

By helping to cut the dollar’s tether to gold, Volcker helped Washington’s politicians engage in perpetual fiscal profligacy.

I know that it’s good to have alternatives to government-created currencies. The dollar’s value is only backed by politicians’ promises. I sure won’t trust those.

Inflation—the government’s expansion of the money supply—creates the appearance of business prosperity along with the fact of general impoverishment, which results in blaming poverty on business and profits.

Rothbard does not refute White’s thesis that Scottish banking was less regulated and hence more stable and well-functioning than England’s banking system in the same 145-year period.

Any official effort to link the dollar to gold today would be just another act of monetary central planning.

Blame the Bankers, Not Freedom in Banking

That there was widespread support for the Scottish bank suspension did not, however, mean that the suspension left the Scottish public unscathed.

Does the Scottish suspension suggest that fractional reserve banking is, inconsistent with genuine freedom in banking, including the consistent honoring of bank customers’ property rights?

If we can’t kill it entirely, we should be thinking about ways to make the Fed less political, not more.

The financial crisis of 2008-9 — accompanied by the Great Recession was caused by government intervention, mainly in mortgage finance and the housing sector.

I don’t trust politicians, generally, but I especially don’t trust them with money. Since the U.S. went off the gold standard, the dollar has lost 80 percent of its value.

Central banking is a form of central planning. The Federal Reserve has a legal monopoly over the monetary system of the United States.

The creation of money doesn’t create wealth, unless money itself is wealth — as it was when it was gold and silver.

John Allison, former CEO & Chairman of BB&T and current president of Cato, talks on the financial crisis and the philosophy of Ayn Rand at the Adam Smith Institute’s first Ayn Rand Lecture at Drapers’ Hall.

Government planners fail to “manage” market economies as the indicators they use are themselves false signals hiding from view the reality of the complex market system.

In the middle of July 2018, President Donald Trump said in an interview that he was “not happy” with the Federal Reserve nudging up interest rates and threatening economic growth in the United States. At the recent Jackson Hole, Wyoming, meeting of global central bank...