All Posts Tagged With: "free-banking"

A Crisis of Political Economy

The current state and the current banking sector require each other. They are so reciprocally intertwined that each is an extension of the other.

Remember this the next time somebody tells you, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert did, that “free market madmen” caused the current financial crisis that is threatening to undermine the global economy. There is no free market. There is no “laissez-faire capitalism.” The government has been deeply involved in setting the parameters for market relations for eons; in fact, genuine “laissez-faire capitalism” has never existed. Yes, trade may have been less regulated in the nineteenth century, but not even the so-called Gilded Age featured “unfettered” markets.

24Apr2009 | Chris Matthew Sciabarra | 5 comments | Continued

Was Money Really Easy Under Greenspan?

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has become everyone’s favorite scapegoat. His policies allegedly caused, or at least contributed to, the current financial crisis. He is attacked from the left for lax financial regulation, from the right for loose monetary policy, and from the middle for both. Yet two years ago, on leaving office, Greenspan [...]

2Mar2009 | David R Henderson and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel | 6 comments | Continued

How Rapidly Should the Money Supply Grow?

I would like to make one correction to Howard Baetjer’s article “Inflation 101” (September). The author suggests that inflation results when the money supply expands faster than the rate at which goods and services are produced. The author correctly points out that this expansion of the money supply will lead to rising prices. But inflation [...]

22Jan2009 | Mike Van Winkle | 0 comments | Continued

The Fed’s Potent Power

The Federal Reserve holds the fate of the U.S. economy in its hands. Or that’s the conclusion many observers draw when they watch investors react wildly to the most minute details of the Fed’s policy statements.
This conclusion is at once exaggerated and accurate.
It’s exaggerated because, at bottom, the Fed controls only the supply of dollars. [...]

1Jan2007 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | Continued