All Posts Tagged With: "fractional-reserve banking"
To the Opponents of Fractional Reserve Banking
There’s nothing wrong with fractional reserve banking that getting rid of central banking and its various interventions can’t cure.
2Dec2010 | Steven Horwitz | 74 comments | ContinuedBank Deregulation: Friend or Foe?
Banking has changed a lot during my lifetime—for the better. The changes are partly due to technology (ATMs, online access), but also to deregulation that subjected banks to a lot more competition. What were the major deregulatory moves and how might they have contributed to the recent crisis? Before addressing those questions, a little personal [...]
22Oct2010 | Warren C. Gibson | 5 comments | ContinuedGovernment’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 | Jeffrey Rogers Hummel | 6 comments | ContinuedFederal Deposit Insurance: A Banking System Built on Sand
Federal deposit insurance grew out of a turbulent time in American history: the Great Depression. During two waves of bank failures in the 1930s an astonishing 9,000 banks closed and millions of depositors lost some or all of their savings. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) began operations in 1934, insuring deposit accounts up to [...]
20May2010 | Warren C. Gibson | 11 comments | ContinuedMeltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse
Thomas Woods’s Meltdown is a marvel of writing and publishing. Having arrived on shelves in February, it offers a complete analysis of the causes of the current recession as well as a critical assessment of the mistakes policymakers have already made, and will likely continue to make, in response to the economic decline. The marvel [...]
23Sep2009 | Steven Horwitz | 15 comments | ContinuedThe Great Depression According to Milton Friedman
The author extends special thanks to Lawrence H. White and Ivan Pongracic, Sr., for their helpful comments. Few events in U.S. history can rival the Great Depression for its impact. The period from 1929 to 1941 saw fundamental changes in the landscape of American politics and economics, including such monumental events as America ‘s going [...]
1Sep2007 | Ivan Pongracic Jr. | 77 comments | ContinuedHazlitt on Gold
Henry Hazlitt concentrated much of his thinking and writing on the topic of money, producing two books and dozens of articles and columns on the subject. His writings during the dark years following World War II, published on the editorial page of the New York Times and in Newsweek, offered intelligent readers ammunition against the [...]
1Nov2004 | Jude Blanchette | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Reserve Requirement Debacle of 1935-1938
Richard Timberlake is a professor of economics retired from the University of Georgia. This is the last in a series. The principal thrust of Treasury-Federal Reserve monetary policy throughout the 1920s and 1930s was by turns restrictive, contractionary, and depressive. Even as the economy was floundering helplessly in a financial environment of monetary austerity, no [...]
1Jun1999 | Richard H. Timberlake | 0 comments | ContinuedMoney in the 1920s and 1930s
Richard Timberlake is a professor of economics retired from the University of Georgia, and author of Monetary Policy in the United States, An Intellectual and Institutional History (University of Chicago Press, 1993). This article is the first in a series. One of the most enduring and troublesome mysteries in economics is money: how it is [...]
1Apr1999 | Richard H. Timberlake | 3 comments | Continued-
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