Central Banks

It seems that the EU leaders have decided on a new military spending spree. To pay for this, the EU will issue new war debt on top of its current high debt loads.

More than a century ago, Congress created the Federal Reserve System to intervene in the American economy. Not even the biggest critics of the central bank‘s formation could have predicted the economic disasters it brought about.

Ryan is joined by Economist and Mises Institute Fellow  Kristoffer Hansen to discuss what would have happened if Argentina President Javier Milei had immediately shut down the country's central bank. The same holds for every other central bank, as well. 

Mainstream economics tells us that we need a growing money supply to keep an economy growing. But what if a growing money supply diminishes economic growth? The Austrians have something to tell us about money growth.

Ryan McMaken and economist Per Bylund discuss the nature of money in our paper-money world. Are Bitcoin and gold money? If not, how do they become money?  

Hans Hoppe recently criticized Argentina‘s President Javier Milei for not closing the country‘s inflationary central bank. In response, Milei claimed that doing so would result in hyperinflation. Given the central bank prints lots of pesos, shutting it obviously would decrease inflation.

One of the fallacies pushed by monetary economists is that a growing economy needs a growing supply of money in order to prevent deflation, which they claim is as harmful as inflation. However, as Austrians point out, there is no “optimum” amount of money in the economy, since prices adjust.

Economist Jonathan Newman joins Ryan to discuss how deficit spending and runaway debt is causing price inflation and higher interest rates. 

In replying to a previous article by Frank Shostak, Douglas French writes that if an increase in the supply of gold ultimately leads to an expansion of bank credit, that is enough to start the boom-and-bust cycles, even if there is no central bank to accelerate the process.

The Federal Reserve and so-called government stabilizers exist ostensibly to balance a market economy that supposedly is fundamentally unstable. But what if government intervention itself causes the instability?