Money & Banking

Is consumer price inflation transitory or persistent?

Those who advocate a world without money advocate an impossible fantasy where nobody would be incentivized to work and rights would be violated as a matter of course.

The Fed’s fixation on consumer prices disguises the real inflation rate.

Record profits are not the sign of a resilient economy but an inflationary effect of reckless money creation

The current fiat monetary system is a zombified version of the original and Bitcoin is no answer to the perversion of a gold sound money system.

Central banking “independence” from politics (fiscal profligacy) seems to be a thing of the past.

It is more convenient for the government to argue that inflation is due to supply-chain shocks or scapegoats (such as evil corporations) than admitting it is of their own doing.

“Although commercial bankers often err in deciding who to lend to, I believe they are far less likely to do so than a body of government-appointed bureaucrats.” – George Selgin

The gold standard wasn’t suspended because it caused the Great Depression or bank failures, nor did it disappear in 1971 because it “didn’t work.” It’s been gone because fiscal alchemists couldn’t expand the gold supply as they expanded government.

The establishment of gold as money is essential to the achievement of a capitalist society.

Inflation is a form of tax, under which portions of the citizenry’s income and wealth is taken from them through reducing the real buying power of money held by all those in the private sector and the general public.

It should never be illegal to do honest business in America, even if that means a transaction isn’t denominated in U.S. dollars.

Professor Niles discusses the economic, political and moral aspects of the U.S. dollar, inflation, gold standard, fiat, money and legal tender laws.

The 1933-37 recovery fell far short of reversing the collapse the U.S. economy suffered between 1929 and 1933, and that this disappointing outcome was the result of New Deal policies aimed at boosting wage rates. The resulting higher wage rates prevented the revival of spending from sponsoring a corresponding revival of employment.

The causes of the gold inflow that fueled the post-1933 recovery, and especially the part played by FDR’s decision to devalue the dollar.

During the opening days of March, 1933, the U.S. economy resembled a stricken body slowly bleeding out, its organs failing one by one. The Federal Reserve System was hemorrhaging gold, and entire state banking systems were shutting down one after another. I

To understand how the world’s largest economy ended up shutting-down its entire banking system, one must first be aware of a long-standing defect of that system and of how it led, first to the proliferation of small and under-diversified banks, and then to as many bank failures.

If ever an administration had control over Fed policy, and monetary policy more generally, FDR’s was it. It follows that, if monetary policy did less than it should have to end the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration must bear a good share of the blame.

Although almost everyone assumes that fiscal stimulus played a big part in bringing the Great Depression to an end, the truth is that its contribution was insignificant.