Money and Banks

As an exciting year comes to a close, we want to thank all of our incredible members that allow us to do the work we do in advancing Austrian economics, freedom, and peace.

Even when a boom is obvious, it is still in the interests of individual owners and consumers to keep it going.

In a recent exchange with Janet Yellen, Senator Ted Cruz blamed the Fed for being too "tight" with monetary policy, thus causing the financial crisis of 2008. Cruz is right that the Fed was at fault, but he's wrong about how.

ZIRP has created massive asset bubbles throughout the world economy, but also has a diabolical impact on ordinary people who are largely disconnected to the bubbles.

Central bankers would have us believe that creating money “out of thin air” is no problem as long as the “demand for money” increases. They also claim that gold-backed money is more prone to booms and busts. But they’re wrong on both counts.

In this audio book, Rothbard shows precisely how banks create money out of thin air and how the central bank, backed by government power, allows them to get away with it.

Opponents of austerity have come out to denounce the idea that it’s bad for governments to borrow. They note that there are benefits to borrowing. The distinction they fail to make is that there’s a big difference between private borrowing and government borrowing.

Government failure was being felt everywhere this week, from the massive law-enforcement failure in Sen Bernardino to the crumbling economy in Brazil. Meanwhile, government tells us it only needs a little more money, power, and time to solve all problems.

Fractional-reserve banking systems create money out of thin air, and this causes malinvestments into less valuable and less productive activities. Eventually, banks realize there's trouble ahead, so they cut back on loans which leads to deflation and crisis.

Republicans and conservative think tanks are apparently convinced that the key to improving the Federal Reserve is to create a "rules-based" monetary policy. But, as is so often the case with economics, things are much more complicated than they seem.