Money and Banks

Presented as part of the Mises Institute’s Brown Bag Seminar series on February 3, 2005 in Auburn, Alabama.

The recent report on personal income and spending showed a full 3.7% increase i

The dollar may not die anytime soon but its capacity for lording it over all living things is ending.

The dollar has hit a new low in recent months on the international currency exchange. The blame is falling from most sectors of public opinion on our legislature, writes Katy Harwood Delay, with its debt spending at an all-time high.

Price stability is a misleading and an inherently contradictory concept. When such a construct as the price index becomes the guiding post for central banks, they will tend to produce and reinforce the very instabilities they proclaim to fight.

The theory of time preference, capital, technology and economic growth will be viewed through both theoretical and historical elements. People have a preference for satisfaction earlier as compared to satisfaction later. Capital goods allow greater production, but this requires saving now, not consuming now.

With the recent rate hike, the mainstream press obediently parrots the macroeconomic analysis offered by our friendly central planners at the Federal Reserve. The average citizen knows that he or she is not nearly smart enough to understand the complex interrelationships of various price indices, yield curves, consumer confidence, and so forth—that’s Greenspan’s job.

Gilligan's Island economics can provide useful thought experiments, writes B.K. Marcus, for the same reasons Robinson Crusoe economics has served as a staple of classical and Austrian School economics texts.

Stefan Karlsson considers the income effect and concludes that its very existence demonstrates the failure of the state to improve the social order.

In a market economy, writes Robert Murphy, the interest rate is not merely a lever to stimulate or depress economic growth.