Back in December, I used one of my weekly Freeman Online columns to address what I saw as a common misunderstanding of how fractional reserve banking works, at least among many who comment on various Internet sites devoted to Austrian economics, especially ones critical of fractional reserve…
Anyone who peruses my work on free banking—or my other writings for that matter—will notice that I'm not especially inclined to express my ideas mathematically. To put the matter more positively: I prefer plain English. The preference has if anything grown more marked over time. While writing…
In a previous post I listed what I consider to be the most important ideas on free banking that have been well known for at least 15 years among those of us interested in the subject. During the 20 years from Friedrich Hayek's revival of interest in…
The library in my old hometown recently held a competition for the unofficial title of poet laureate of the city. They found two people worthy of the title. One is a high school buddy of mine. Seeing the newspaper story set my mind wandering down the byways…
(This one's especially for GPO.) In the aftermath of the U.S. banking crises of the 1930s, it became common for American economists to speak of the "inherent" instability of fractional-reserve banking and of the "perverse elasticity" of money supply in fractional-reserve banking systems. What the economists in…