All Posts Tagged With: "Federal Reserve"

Inflation Isn’t Coming?

Libertarian columnist Stephen Chapman sounds a dissenting note against the warnings of an approaching price inflation: There is no indication that inflation is heating up this time, either. Investors wouldn’t be snapping up three-year Treasury notes at 1 percent if they were expecting their purchasing power to be ravaged by wolves any moment now…. The [...]

14May2011 | | 4 comments | Continued

Quantitative Uneasiness

In their recent paper, “Has the Fed Been a Failure?,” George A. Selgin, William D. Lastrapes, and Lawrence H. White conclude that over nearly 100 years the Federal Reserve’s performance has been mostly awful. Unfortunately, the Fed is currently engaged in a policy that will likely make a nice addition to their article. This policy, [...]

21Apr2011 | | 37 comments | Continued

Who Owns the Fed?

Have you heard? The Federal Reserve System raked in profits of $79.3 billion last year, almost triple what runner-up ExxonMobil made. The Fed’s business model is a snap—just print money—and unlike poor beleaguered Exxon, the Fed has no competition to worry about. This means a gigantic windfall for the big banks because, although they don’t [...]

21Apr2011 | | 20 comments | Continued

A Simple Solution

By overriding market money prices we deny ourselves important data about the country’s fiscal health.

11Apr2011 | | 3 comments | Continued

Defining “Terrorism” Down

If Bernard von NotHaus did anything, he exposed the sorry fact that U.S. money is hopelessly debased. If that is proof of terrorism, then anyone who openly criticizes this government and its money is a terrorist.

30Mar2011 | | 2 comments | Continued

A Victim of the State

I feel safer with Bernard von NotHaus doing what he does than with Ben Bernanke doing what he does.

25Mar2011 | | 34 comments | Continued

Central Banking Beats Free Banking?

In “More Bits on Whether We Need a Fed,” a November 21 Marginal Revolution blog post, George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen questions “why free banking would offer an advantage over post-WWII central banking (combined with FDIC and paper money).” He adds, “That’s long been the weak spot of the anti-Fed case.” Free banking [...]

23Mar2011 | | 3 comments | Continued

Gold and Money, II

Last month we examined some propositions about gold as money, drawing from theory and history. This month we ask whether and how gold might once again serve a monetary function. Money of any sort, commodity-based or not, derives its value in large part from what economists call a “network effect.” Like a fax machine, whose [...]

23Mar2011 | | 10 comments | Continued

Money, Inflation, and Rising World Commodity Prices

Chairman Bernanke is being disingenuous about the options foreign central banks and governments have to counteract the Fed’s easy-money policy that threatens a global outbreak of inflation similar to the 1970s.

28Feb2011 | | 6 comments | Continued

Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves

Books about the 2008 financial crisis keep coming, and New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin offers one of the better accounts of the meltdown. Using a large number of interviews, he reconstructs the words and acts of key people during the six months from the near-collapse of Bear Stearns in March to the bankruptcy [...]

24Feb2011 | | 0 comments | Continued

“F” as in Fed

The Federal Reserve, America’s fatally conceited monetary central planner, is not terribly popular these days—which is cause for hope—and now we have a report card on the entire Fed era that strongly supports the view that we’d be better off without it. At the very least, as the authors suggest, the burden of proof is [...]

24Feb2011 | | 1 comment | Continued

“F” as in Fed

The burden of proof is squarely on those who would retain the central bank.

10Dec2010 | | 21 comments | Continued

A Free Market in Banking? Not Even Close

Between the state and national governments, there has always been substantial regulation of money and banking in the United States.

3Dec2010 | | 13 comments | Continued

The Great Money Binge: Spending Our Way to Socialism

“Can we do it again?” asks Amity Shlaes in her introduction to this book. She is asking about the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. In his final chapter George Melloan answers yes. But it won’t be easy because of the great expansion of government in 2008-09. He calls for a new vision of “Supply-Side Prosperity.” [...]

24Nov2010 | | 0 comments | Continued

Inflating Our Way to Prosperity?

As more and more money is pumped into the economy, not only do prices go up, but so do inflationary expectations.

10Nov2010 | | 9 comments | Continued

Memo to Alan Greenspan: Keep Quiet

I’m getting tired of Alan Greenspan. First, the former Federal Reserve chairman blamed an allegedly unregulated free market for the housing and financial debacle. Now he favors repealing the Bush-era tax cuts. This has a certain sad irony. Recall that Greenspan once was an associate of Ayn Rand, the philosophical novelist who provided a moral [...]

22Oct2010 | | 10 comments | Continued

Government’s Diminishing Benefits from Inflation

For millennia governments have resorted to expanding the money stock, either through coinage debasement or fiat money, to finance their expenditures. This expedient, with its resulting price inflation, has occurred most noticeably during wars. And the Zimbabwe hyperinflation of 2007–08, the second worst in world history, peaking at a rate of 79.6 billion percent per [...]

22Oct2010 | | 6 comments | Continued
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