Monetary Policy

My Two-Bit Political Awakening

by James Bovard December 1, 2021

Samuel Johnson may have been wrong when he declared, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” But for young kids, collecting coins is a less pernicious pastime than becoming a pyromaniac or Tik-Tok star. My own experience collecting, buying, and selling coins vaccinated me against trusting politicians long before ...

Inflation Is a Dangerous Way to Get Rid of Debt Burdens

by Richard M. Ebeling June 2, 2021

Suppose you lent someone $100, and when they paid you back they only handed you, say, $99 or $80. Would you consider the borrower to have kept his promise and contractual obligation? Or would you think that he had cheated you out of a part of the money you had lent him in good faith? Well, there are those ...

Monetary Inflation’s Game of Hide-and-Seek

by Richard M. Ebeling May 18, 2021

The May 12, 2021, press release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the month of April sent the stock markets tumbling for two days and generated fodder for the news pundits with the announcement that the CPI measure of the cost-of-living had increased 4.2 percent at an annualized ...

Dangerous Monetary Manipulations and Fiscal Follies

by Richard M. Ebeling April 7, 2021

Back in the 1960s, Everett Dirksen (1896-1969) served as the Republican Party minority leader in the U.S. Senate. One of his famous lines about federal government spending was, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Those days are long past. Now it’s: A trillion here, and a trillion there, and then you ...

The Gold Clause: A Free-Market Gold Standard

by Wendy McElroy December 1, 2020

President Franklin Roosevelt destroyed one of the most valuable uses of gold when he nationalized ownership of the metal in 1933: the gold clause. This value did not return when private ownership of gold was legalized once more in 1974, partly because its use is still discouraged by anti-usury laws. The impact of its sudden absence was dramatized by a ...

Do Not Trust Governments with the Control of Money

by Richard M. Ebeling November 17, 2020

If there is one thing that is fairly certain in this life – besides the seeming inescapability of death and taxes – is that once someone is appointed to almost any position in the political and bureaucratic structures of a government they soon discover how important and essential is the organization of which they are a part for the ...

Paul Krugman’s Ad Hominem Defense of Central Banking

by Richard M. Ebeling August 4, 2020

One of the sorriest aspects of almost all political discussions nowadays is how often they seem to degenerate into rude ad hominem attacks rather than more reasoned arguments over the pros and cons of what public policies might be most conducive to achieving various social and economic goals. An example of this is an opinion piece by economist Paul Krugman ...

Gold and Free Banking versus Central Banking

by Richard M. Ebeling July 28, 2020

In spite of the officially declared “independence” of the Federal Reserve from the immediate political control of either Congress or the White House, America’s central bank is, nonetheless, a branch of the U.S. government that is responsible for setting monetary policy, overseeing a variety of banking regulations, and influencing market interest rates. As a result, politics is always present ...

The Money-Printing Gods Have Failed

by David Stockman March 17, 2020

Hooray! Finally even the robo-machines and day traders are puking, not BTFDing. Today’s 3,000 Dow Point Dump says even they have had enough of the craven dolts who occupy the Eccles Building. You do not need an PhD in economics—or even a night school survey course—to see that COVID-19 is temporary supply side shock which 0.05% money market rates are powerless ...

The Technocrats Will Not Save Us

by Richard M. Ebeling February 25, 2020

Besides the certainty, as they say, of death and taxes, one other highly likely event will be an end to the general “good times” of relatively low price inflation and low unemployment in America. In other words, the United States will eventually experience worsening inflation at some point, as well as another general economic downturn. The question is, what ...

Monetary Destruction in America

by Jacob G. Hornberger February 1, 2020

The Constitution made it crystal clear what the official money of the United States was to be when it called the federal government into existence. That money was to be gold coins and silver coins, not paper money. Article 1, Section 10, of the Constitution, which is a restriction on the power of the states, states, “No State shall ... ...

Freedom and Prosperity: The Importance of Sound Money

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2019

Sound money is a key to a free and prosperous society. That principle was clearly reflected in the monetary system that the Constitution established when it called the federal government into existence. Our ancestors didn’t trust government officials with power. They believed that the greatest threat to their own freedom and well-being lay not with some foreign regime but rather ...