Money and Banking

With huge debts and an immensely inflated supply of dollars, the US is vulnerable to its own "Suez moment" in which foreign regimes can nullify American foreign policy without firing a shot.

Measuring aggregate prices through a consumer price index is inherently arbitrary because someone decides what to measure and how. There are better ways to do it, but "fixing" the measure will do nothing to fix the ills of the Fed's monetary policy.

In their new book The Next Generation of Austrian Economics, editors Per Bylund and David Howden bring together a thirteen young Austrian scholars into a new volume of scholarly commentary on money, banking, capital, risk, entrepreneurship, and more.

Today on The Santelli Exchange on CNBC, Rick Santelli acknowledged CHASE Bank's war on cash using Joe Salerno's Mises Wire post from Monday: 

Thanks to the central bank, those who worked hard and “played by the rules” all their lives now face an uncertain future as inflation c

In this lecture from last week's Sound Money seminar at the Mises Institute, Jonathan Newman explains the basics of how the central bank's distortion of interest rates and the money supply brings booms and busts.

At his new blog, Ben Bernanke is coming up with new excuses as to why the current recovery is so weak and why mega-low interest rates — and thus a lack of options for middle-income savers seeking interest income — aren't his fault.

"Sound money and free banking are not impossible; they are merely illegal," Hans Sennholz wrote. Today, the barriers to competition in money and free-market banking are numerous, but even a few non-radical changes could open up a new world of options and competition for bankers and consumers.

As the money supply fluctuates, so does the demand for money and for goods and services. We see this in the stock market, but the effect is not instantaneous, and we must be mindful of the time delay.

While not at all perfect, the classical gold standard of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century facilitated some of the greatest leaps in economic prosperity ever witnessed. Marcia Christoff-Kurapovna surveys the views of central bankers and economists of the time.