“There can be nothing more unreal in its pretensions than debt currency itself.” — Charles Holt Carroll (1860) Charles Holt Carroll defended sound money in a blazing series of essays appearing in the latter decades of the 19th century. They are collected in the book, Organization of Debt into Currency and Other Papers (newly online on Mises.org)
As if fighting inflation, smoothing out the business cycle, and saving the world from economic crises were not enough, central banks are being advised to include another objective in their mission: the purchase and management of stock portfolios. The Washington Post reports that former Treasury Secretary (and soon-to-be-former president of Harvard
Mike Shedlock gives a rather Austrian-flavored explanation of inflation , noting that it is “best described as a net expansion of money supply and credit” through fractional reserve banking; that it cannot accurately be measured; that it can not accurately be measured with a fixed index; and that it generates a boom and bust cycle. Then why does
Danilo Nogueira provides a brief history of the Brazilian inflation in The Language of Inflation: Traps in Translating Brazilian Portuguese . The article is one of the more insightful articles that I have seen on the topic. The author, a business translator, examines the inflation from a translator’s perspective. He illustrates what Hayek called
MSN hosts a debate between Peter Schiff and Diane Swonk on Inflation: Fact or Fiction? . Schiff makes a number of very Austrian-sounding points: inflation is an expanion of money and credit, not rising prices inflation affected mostly financial markets in the 90s - money created here went abroad for goods, while foreigners sent the money back for
A news story has been circulating that a man was busted carrying counterfeit $1 Billion dollar bills. . The counterfeit money looked good, but there was one flaw: there is no such thing as a billion-dollar bill. US Customs agents in California say they found 250 bogus billion-dollar bills while investigating a man charged with currency smuggling.
Economist John Williams is interviewed [site declined to let Mises.org link on grounds of copyright, or something — ed.] [and the same for the PDF that was once linked here — ed.] about his research (available on his web site, [which is also no longer linked because the site manager refused to grant permission for “several weeks” — ed.] Shadow
Brad Setser at RGE Monitor provide this commentary on the management of foreign dollar holdings. Setser cites several sources on the accumulation by governments around the world — mostly of oil exporting nations — of large dollar-denominated funds. While it has been common for a while for countries to amass enormous foreign exchange reserves, and
Is the Chinese boom sustainable, or is China headed for a slowdown or even a financial crisis? A debate is taking place in the Far Eastern Economic Review over how the Chinese boom is being funded: bank credit expansion or retained earnings. Hofman and Kujis of the World Bank credit retained earnings by highly profitable Chinese businesses in
China has pegged the exchange rate of their currency in dollars to a below-market level. In order to enforce this price control, the central bank must be willing to purchase any amount of dollars offered at the official rate. After a number of years, they have, as reported by the China Daily , accumulated over $1 trillion of so-called “reserves”.
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The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
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