Monetary Policy

One Hundred Years of the Federal Reserve

by Sheldon Richman December 24, 2013

Two days before Christmas 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, creating America’s latest and current central bank, the Federal Reserve System. It’s a sobering thought that in the 100 years since the Fed’s creation, the dollar has lost 95 percent of its value. Had the Fed never been created, America would be dotted with Nickel Stores ...

One Hundred Years of the Federal Reserve

by Sheldon Richman December 1, 2013

Two days before Christmas 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, creating America’s latest and current central bank, the Federal Reserve System. It’s a sobering thought that in the 100 years since the Fed’s creation, the dollar has lost 95 percent of its value. Had the Fed never been created, America would be dotted with Nickel Stores ...

Inflation Is the Last Thing We Need

by Sheldon Richman October 31, 2013

“Some economists say more inflation is just what the American economy needs to escape from a half-decade of sluggish growth and high unemployment,” the New York Times reports. One is Harvard economist Kenneth S. Rogoff, quoted in the Times: “Weighed against the political, social and economic risks of continued slow growth after a once-in-a-century financial crisis, a sustained ...

The Libertarian Angle: Inflation and the Federal Reserve

by Future of Freedom Foundation October 28, 2013

Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman on monetary policy. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly.

Delete the Fed

by Sheldon Richman August 20, 2013

Who should run the Federal Reserve System when chairman Ben Bernanke’s term expires next year: Vice Chair Janet Yellen or former Obama adviser Lawrence Summers? Neither. Who then? No one. The fact is, we need the Federal Reserve like we need a hole in the head. Contrary to folklore, the Fed is not needed to stabilize the economy or to prevent unemployment. As ...

Should the Purchasing Power of Money Be Stabilized?

by Alexander William Salter August 1, 2013

Economists have long debated the costs and benefits of stabilizing the purchasing power of money. Today, most First World countries’ central banks either pursue the stabilization of purchasing power as a primary goal, as in the case of the European Central Bank (technically, the stabilization of the rate of change of money’s purchasing power, by means of an inflation ...

The Libertarian Angle: The Federal Reserve

by Future of Freedom Foundation July 29, 2013

Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman discuss the Federal Reserve and monetary policy. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly.

Deflation, Liquidation, and Necessary Revisionism

by Tim Kelly February 1, 2013

During his ill-fated 1932 reelection campaign Herbert Hoover delivered a speech in which he said, In the midst of this hurricane the Republican administration kept a cool head, and it rejected every counsel of weakness and cowardice. Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until it had found its own bottom. ...

QE Forever and John Q. Public

by Tim Kelly October 4, 2012

The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) has voted to launch a third round of quantitative easing (QE3), this time focused on purchasing as much as $40 billion a month in mortgage-backed securities. This decision to provide liquidity ad infinitum could add nearly half a trillion to the Fed’s balance sheet annually and hold the federal-funds rate near zero ...

The GOP’s Gold Plank

by Tim Kelly September 6, 2012

The 2012 Republican Party platform contains a plank concerning a possible return to the gold or other metallic standard. The US dollar has been a fiat currency since President Richard Nixon suspended its convertibility to gold on August 15, 1971. The plank reads, Determined to crush the double-digit inflation that was part of the Carter Administration’s economic legacy, President Reagan, shortly ...

The Roots of America’s Financial Crises

by Martin Morse Wooster May 1, 2012

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2010); 393 pages. It is obvious by now that the massive U.S. debt cannot be sustained. Last year’s downgrading by Standard and Poor’s of the U.S. government’s credit rating is but the latest signal that the Obama administration’s policy of an ever-expanding ...

The Prospects for Sound Money

by Tim Kelly January 9, 2012

A silver lining of the global economic crisis is that millions of people have been awakened to the importance of sound money to a modern economy. The housing bubble and subsequent bust, excessive leveraging, reckless speculation, and the sovereign-debt crisis afflicting Europe and the United States would all have been averted had money been commodity-based (e.g., gold and silver) ...