All Posts Tagged With: "gold standard"
Biography of the Dollar: How the Mighty Buck Conquered the World and Why It’s Under Siege
Think of the various dollar-denominated bills in your pocket. They surely represent value, but with the dollar backed by nothing beyond trust in the United States and its Treasury, the greenback’s success as a worldwide store of value is something of a marvel.
Wall Street Journal reporter Craig Karmin’s Biography of the Dollar helps us to [...]
The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
Reading The Return of Depression Economics, I have to admit I was surprised. Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics and New York Times columnist, isn’t as feisty and partisan in the book as he is in his column. Moreover, he presents some useful information about the many economic collapses that have occurred in [...]
18Nov2009 | William L. Anderson | 0 comments | ContinuedRutherford B. Hayes and the Financing of American Prosperity
Rutherford B. Hayes, America’s nineteenth president (1877–1881), is generally dismissed as a minor, even below-average president. Matthew Josephson, the journalist-chronicler of the late 1800s, insisted that Hayes had “no capacity for . . . large-minded leadership.” Other historians have written him off as just another cipher among a string of forgettable chief executives of the [...]
23Oct2009 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 1 comment | ContinuedHow Much Money Does an Economy Need?
In How Much Money Does an Economy Need? Hunter Lewis addresses some of the most fundamental questions of monetary policy in a question-and-answer format. For a subject often clouded by technicalities, the language is refreshingly plain. Sometimes too plain, perhaps, to satisfy an academic economist. But academic economists aren’t the intended audience. The book can [...]
15Oct2009 | Lawrence H. White | 1 comment | ContinuedA 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 | ContinuedWas 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 | ContinuedNixon’s New Economic Plan
Richard Nixon had a crisis mentality. In 1962, unhappily out of public office, he wrote an autobiographical account entitled Six Crises. Whereas some presidents have faced real crises, however, Nixon’s were more the product of his personal sense of siege. As president he twice declared a state of national emergency, first on March 23, 1970, [...]
20Jan2009 | Robert Higgs | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Times that Tried Men’s Economic Souls
Two hundred and thirty years ago this month in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, the brutal and storied winter of 1777–78 came to a long-awaited close. Nearly a quarter of George Washington’s Continental Army troops encamped there had died—victims of hunger, exposure, and disease. Almost every American knows that much, but few can tell you why Congress [...]
1Mar2008 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | ContinuedMonetary-Policy Disasters of the Twentieth Century
Kirby R. Cundiff is an associate professor of finance at Northeastern State University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an adjunct associate professor of finance at the University of Maryland University College.
The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913 and soon did what central banks almost always do: it started printing lots of money. During World War [...]
From the Armistice to the Great Depression
When the Armistice took effect on November 11, 1918, bringing World War I to a close, the belligerent nations of Europe were economically almost prostrate—their labor forces and capital stocks depleted greatly, their domestic economic structures distorted grotesquely, and their old arrangements for international trade and investment shattered.
To make matters worse, the Versailles Treaty, signed [...]
Book Reviews – December 2006
- The Ethics of the Market
by John Meadowcroft Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
- Peddling Panaceas: Popular Economists _in the New Deal Era
by Gary Dean Best Reviewed by Burton Folsom, Jr
- Philosophers of Capitalism: _Menger, Mises, Rand, and Beyond
by Edward W. Younkins Reviewed by Aeon J. Skoble
- Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in _Black America
by John McWhorter Reviewed by George C. Leef
Milton Friedman (1912-2006)
Milton Friedman, who died last month at age 94, was one of the twentieth century’s most influential champions of individual liberty and free markets. The 1976 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and an early associate of FEE, Friedman did more than any single person in our time to teach the public the merits [...]
1Dec2006 | Richard M. Ebeling and Sheldon | 1 comment | ContinuedJohn Maynard Keynes: The Damage Still Done by a Defunct Economist
Seventy years ago, on February 4, 1936, the English economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) published what soon became his most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Few books, in so short a time, have gained such wide influence and generated so destructive an impact on public policy. What Keynes succeeded in [...]
1May2006 | Richard M. Ebeling | 32 comments | ContinuedHazlitt on Gold
Jude Blanchette is a research fellow at FEE.
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 [...]
Book Reviews – September 2004
The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life
by Paul Seabright
Princeton University Press • 2004 • 304 pages • $29.95
Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
One of the most profound insights of economics is that the activities of billions of people can be coordinated without central direction and without most of these interdependent people knowing anything [...]
The Dreaded D Word
Deflation is a much-feared economic phenomenon, perhaps because it is most often associated with the Great Depression of the 1930s or with the recent troubles in Japan. and yet deflation has not always been coincident with periods of depression.
The general record of the nineteenth century, in sharp contrast to that of the twentieth, was one [...]
Economics on Trial
The Laffer Curve—the theory that when taxes are too high, reducing them would actually raise tax revenue—is dismissed. “When Reagan cut taxes after he was elected, the result was less revenue, not more,” reports Mankiw in his popular textbook.2 Never mind that tax revenues actually rose significantly every year of the Reagan administration; the perception is that supply-side economics has been discredited.
1Feb2000 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | Continued-
Latest Toon
-
Book Reviews
-
The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
