Money and Banking

This lecture by Philipp Bagus was presented at the 2012 Mises University in Auburn, Alabama. Includes an introduction my Mark Thornton.

In their new book “Money”, Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames write with insight about the dangers of inflation and easy money, but ultima

Soon you will no longer be able to purchase Switzerland’s finest watches for cash.

Politicians and the mainstream media have faith in the central banks to manipulate and manage the global economy.

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.

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.

Low interest rates combined with high-risk fractional reserve banking creates a powder keg on which we’re sitting today, writes Frank Hollenbeck.

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