Money & Banking

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?

One of the biggest, and one of the oldest, taxes is inflation. Governments have stolen their people’s resources this way, not just for centuries, but for thousands of years.

Why does anyone use bitcoin and what accounts for its popularity in some countries and industries?

Another view on Bitcoins.

Risky as this new currency may be, I still trust it more than I trust politicians.

All that glitters is not gold.

Gold moved from $300 to $1,800 not because investors believed the government would hold the line on debt, but because they believed that the U.S. fiscal position would get progressively worse. That is what happened this week.

How could the Yellen’s and Bernanke’s of the world possibly think that counterfeiting money is a good idea?

Many have understandably sensed that central banks may well have acted to allow bullion banks to take out massive naked short positions in precious metals in order to drive down the price.