As reported by The Cobden Centre, on Thursday, Jesús Huerta de Soto gave the 2010 Hayek lecture at the London School of Economics. You can find the text of his speech here and a podcast of his preview interview here. A video will follow in due course. Yesterday, I gave a […]
Read MorePost Tagged with: "Money"
Debauching the Currency
In the course of writing a presentation on bank reform, I rediscovered this from Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace: Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, […]
Read MoreThree kinds of socialist
Via Arthur Edwards, a section from Riegel’s book A New Approach to Freedom: The Right-Wing Socialists THERE ARE three classes of socialists: the left-wing, or Marxist, group, who believe that the government should own and control everything; the middle-of-the-road socialists, who believe the government should own and operate public utilities; […]
Read MoreJames Tyler: Money is not working
I happened to rediscover today James Tyler’s speech to Policy Exchange on 31 March 2009: I want to talk about two things today; Number 1: Free markets did NOT cause this crisis… Governments did. Number 2: Inflation targeting has failed. Money has failed. What should we do? It’s a fascinating […]
Read MoreUS money supply plunges at 1930s pace as Obama eyes fresh stimulus – Telegraph
Via The Telegraph. The M3 money supply in the United States is contracting at an accelerating rate that now matches the average decline seen from 1929 to 1933, despite near zero interest rates and the biggest fiscal blitz in history. But this begs the question, “Why is the money supply dependent […]
Read MoreThe Emperor’s New Clothes
Over at The Cobden Centre, entrepreneur and Austrian-school economist Toby Baxendale stands courageously on the shoulders of great men to explain how we can begin to reconstruct our broken monetary regime. Baxendale explains that we can end the financial crisis, pay off the national debt and give a 28.5% income […]
Read MoreNew Labour and quantitative easing
In the course of scheduling a series of articles for The Cobden Centre on the Theory of Money and Credit, I found this quote which seems apposite after our recent spell of “quantitative easing”, the injection of new money into the economy, also known in some circles as inflation of the […]
Read MoreA Free Money Movement?
Via today’s Cobden Centre article, A Free Money Movement, Antoine Clarke predicts the rise of the Free Money Movement called for by Hayek: What we now need is a Free Money Movement comparable to the Free Trade Movement ofthe 19th century, demonstrating not merely the harm caused by acute inflation, […]
Read MoreRon Paul, End the Fed
US Republican Congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul has released End the Fed. Paul explains why we should care about central banks, how we got into the present economic mess and why the Federal Reserve should be abolished. It is a brief and enjoyable read with suggestions for more […]
Read MoreInflation’s Moral Hazard by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Summer 2009
But asset inflation—ultimately, the debasement of the currency—as the principal source of wealth corrodes the character of people. It not only undermines the traditional bourgeois virtues but makes them ridiculous and even reverses them. Prudence becomes imprudence, thrift becomes improvidence, sobriety becomes mean-spiritedness, modesty becomes lack of ambition, self-control becomes […]
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