Money and Banks

This week’s Iowa caucuses mean that election season has officially begun. While the names may change, the spectacle every four years represents the triumph of compulsion over cooperation.

Lately, the Fed has been more and more involved in directly funding the Federal government by handing over Fed revenues to the Treasury. In fact, the Fed is handing over enough money to fund the entire food stamp program, and then some.

The public has been successfully conditioned to view the use of cash as something suspicious. Meanwhile, thanks to growing pressure from government, private business now often considers cash to be more trouble than it's worth.

New technologies, such as the blockchain technology behind digital currencies like bitcoin, may in the future facilitate the convenient use of precious metals as money once again.

After a week of jittery markets, join us LIVE online Saturday for our Mises Circle in Houston, where we'll discuss where the world is headed in 2016.

Thanks to relentless government intervention, the economy in Brazil is in deep trouble. Anyone familiar with Austrian business cycle theory, however, could have predicted the current troubles long ago.

We're being told to blame the current market volatility and emerging crisis on oil prices, China, and a "strong dollar." To find the real causes, though, we must look at central banks and at past mistakes and malinvestments.

Fear is in the air. Central bankers are warning of crisis, and while mainstream economists fear the falling prices that are on the horizon in our post-boom world, Austrians know that deflation and recessions are both inevitable and necessary.

Barron's is writing about skyscrapers and the Skyscraper Curse. They also quote me on the subject.

Following the discovery of the Americas, Spain began a 300-year period of booms, busts, war, and mercantilism. Only in the eighteenth century did the country begin to find prosperity through liberalization of trade and private property.