Money and Banking

Years before the English currency school made it famous, Americans were arguing for one hundred percent reserves, and some wanted banking abolished outright.

Before the Federal Reserve, before the greenback, American writers were already designing a managed national paper currency, and arguing it could be more stable than gold.

Four western states answered the shortage of money by printing their own, and watched it depreciate in their hands.

A wartime boom, a flood of bank paper, a speculative rush for western land, and then the reckoning.

Mark Thornton, Ryan McMaken, Kevin Duffy, and JP Cortez close out the 2026 New Mexico Mises Circle by taking audience questions on gold, silver, Bitcoin, investing in China, the fate of the dollar, and the ballooning national debt.

JP Cortez argues fiat money is a hidden theft, and that the fix is a bottom-up, state-level push to remove the taxes and rules that stop Americans from freely choosing gold and silver.

Ryan McMaken shows how seizing control of money was central to building the modern state — a centuries-long project that culminated in World War I destroying the gold standard.

Deflate the dollars, or redefine the dollar’s weight—or some blend of the two.

Not a novelty but an inheritance: Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and hard-money.

An opponent of gold describes the 100 percent standard better than its friends do.