Monetary Policy

Close Down the IMF

by Sheldon Richman May 27, 2011

International Monetary Fund director Dominique Strauss-Kahn is out after being charged with sexual assault against a hotel maid in New York. Unfortunately many members of the world’s governing elite stand ready to take his place. Who should succeed Strauss-Kahn — a European or someone from the developing world? If the criterion is the welfare of ordinary people, the answer ...

Hidden Inflation and Debilitating Deficits

by Anthony Gregory May 26, 2011

After the 2008 financial collapse, many of us called on politicians to let the market correct itself. The government’s expansion of the housing sector and the Fed’s artificially low interest rates caused an unsustainable and thus ultimately destructive boom, which eventually leads to a bust. This explanation of the business cycle won F.A. Hayek the economics Nobel Prize in ...

The Jacob Hornberger Show: Gold, Freedom, and the Fed

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 2, 2011

The Jacob Hornberger Show broadcasts live Saturday night at 7pm EST. Visit FFF's Ustream Channel to watch the show live. Download the MP3 here, or subscribe to the RSS feed

The Threat to Sound Money and the Free Banking Solution (video)

by Lawrence H. White April 11, 2011

On April 4, 2011, Lawrence H. White gave the following speech at The Future of Freedom Foundations Economic Liberty Lecture Series. The speech can viewed below in its entirety. Lawrence H. White is a professor of economics at George Mason University. Prior to position at George Mason, he was the F. A. Hayek Professor of Economic History in the ...

Time to Rein in Federal Spending

by Laurence M. Vance December 21, 2010

The debate in Congress over the extension of the Bush tax cuts has obscured the issue of government spending. After all, it is because members of Congress love to spend money that isn’t theirs that we “need” an income tax to begin with. Government spending is out of control. The federal budget is fast approaching $4 trillion. The budget deficit ...

Lessons from a Bloated Budget

by Laurence M. Vance November 1, 2010

President Obama has just sent to Congress the largest federal budget ever in U.S. history. His $3.518 trillion budget is also the most unbalanced in history, with a built-in deficit of $1.413 trillion. The United States has rarely in its history had a balance of receipts and outlays. Deficit spending has been the norm, with the last real budget surplus ...

The Distortions Wrought by the Corporatist State

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 2010

“What kind of society gives that kind of money to people who create ... nothing?” That was Chris Matthews’s comment on his MSNBC program Hardball after reporting that “the top 25 hedge fund managers made $25 billion last year.” Most libertarians will have a natural reflex against a statement like that. Indeed, Matthews packs lots of fallacies into a few ...

Lessons for America from Germany’s Hyperinflation, Part 2

by Jim Powell June 1, 2010

Part 1 | Part 2 By November 1922, the German economy was collapsing. Industries shut down. The government committed itself to paying money to the thousands of workers who became unemployed. Within six months, the government was providing a trillion marks a month in emergency credits to failing banks, railroads, manufacturing businesses, and agricultural cooperatives. On July 1, 1923, ...

Lessons for America from Germany’s Hyperinflation, Part 1

by Jim Powell May 1, 2010

Part 1 | Part 2 Many Americans may be inclined to assume that Germans were barbaric because they supported Hitler, and whatever happened there couldn’t possibly apply to the United States. But the Germans have had much more in common with Americans than we might realize. Germans were educated and industrious. Germany had world-class universities. Germans long led the world ...

Bernanke Has the Whole World in His Hands

by Sheldon Richman February 25, 2010

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke has a big task ahead of him. He has to withdraw most of the $2.2 trillion the Fed created and pumped into the banking system since 2007 before a monster inflation strikes and robs of us our purchasing power. But he has do it without sending the economy back into a recession in ...

Obama’s Phony Populism

by Sheldon Richman February 23, 2010

President Obama likes to portray himself as a man of the people. But a look behind the veil shows this to be a deception. Take the financial regulatory overhaul brewing in Washington. I know what you’re thinking: What could better illustrate Obama’s bona fides as a champion of the people? He wants to regulate the banking industry after the recent ...

Government Caused the Meltdown

by George Leef December 1, 2009

Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas E. Woods (Regnery, 2009); 194 pages. Thomas Woodss Meltdown is a truly radical book. That is to say, it probes to the root ...