Dear Mr. Price: I read your piece: “On the Use of Gold Coins as Money” (http://www.plata.com.mx/mplata/articulos/arti…iidarticulo=196). I think you ask the right question. This is the elephant in the room. Why do gold and silver not circulate? I love your analogy of the Swiss asserting that they will “allow” gold to have a monetary role, […]
In Free Market Revolution, co-authors Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, colleagues at the Ayn Rand Institute, undertook a difficult task. Since Ayn Rand made the case for egoism as the morality of capitalism in Atlas Shrugged (and more pointedly in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal), numerous books have argued that free markets produce wealth, discussing various […]
The financial press and alternative investing blogosphere is all abuzz about proposed German controls that attack High Frequency Trading (http://www.cnbc.com/id/49174317). Government always justifies its coercive intrusion into markets by appeal to a sense of the “public good”, and its interference never delivers the goodies as advertises (see my doctoral dissertation for a full explanation of […]
In a gold-based monetary system, every asset is ultimately backed by gold. This does not mean that every debtor (including banks) keeps the full amount of its liability in gold coin just lying around. Why would one bother to borrow if one did not need the money? It means that every asset generates a gold […]
I have written other pieces on the topic of fractional reserve banking and duration mismatch, which is when someone borrows short-term money to lend long-term and how falling interest rates actually encourage duration mismatch. Falling interest rates are a feature of our current monetary regime, so central that any look at a graph of 10-year […]
© April 28, 2012 by Keith Weiner Today, the government of the USA is in an accelerating transition. For the first 100 years (with a few exceptions) the government of the USA existed to set man free from men. The rights of the people were respected by the law and by the courts. And it […]
26/04/12 Keith Weiner Dear Professor Keen, I am a monetary scientist and a fan of some of your work. I admire the courage it took for you to call the Australian housing crisis as early as you did, and to make a bet that you would be right. But I came across this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aqY_DYtp60s#), […]
I am writing this, having just returned from the fourth course at the New Austrian School of Economics, in Munich. The single biggest theme was the rate of interest and its linkage to prices. Kondratieff, among several others, have observed that rising prices lead to rising interest rates and vice versa. And the opposite case […]
As the title of this essay suggests, a loan is an exchange of wealth for income. Like everything else in a free market (imagine happier days of yore), it is a voluntary trade. Contrary to the endemic language of victimization, both parties regard themselves as gaining thereby, or else they would not enter into the […]
In my last piece, The Laffer Curve and Austrian Economics, I argued that the “Laffer Maxima” moves depending on where the economy is in the boom-bust credit cycle. I used an example of a marginal restaurant business in the bust phase, which fails when the income tax rate on the people who live nearby rises […]
