Banking

Archive for Banking

BMS ep. 149: George Selgin Critiques MMT then Debates Bob on Fractional Reserve Banking

Audio here, video below:

Tom and Bob Take Over the Austrian Central Bank

This video recently came to light…

Do the Econ Textbooks Get Money & Banking Backwards?

The latest installment in my series on Understanding Money Mechanics for the Mises Institute. Once I dove into this one, the solutions seemed pretty obvious. Tell me what you folks think. An excerpt: In chapter 5 we reviewed the textbook analysis of how a central bank buys government debt in “open market operations” to add […]

Response to Selgin on Fractional Reserve Banking and the Business Cycle, Part I

George Selgin has a 3-part series (I, II, and III) at Alt-M taking people (like me) to task for claiming that FRB per se causes the boom-bust cycle as described by Mises/Hayek. To be clear, George is putting aside the issue of whether FRB is fraud, and is just focusing on the economics. (He thinks […]

The Myth of Fed Independence

My latest article is feisty. It sounds like I’m defending Trump and then…BAM! I go full Rothbard. Trump committed a faux pas with his public complaints about the Fed. But his actual “mistake” was in letting the American people in on a dirty secret: The central bank is by its very nature a political institution […]

Further Thoughts on Fractional Reserve Banking and Simple Theft

Again, it looks like I’m loading the deck by saying “FRB is like a mugger,” but that’s not the motivation for this analogy… If you haven’t already read it, you should check out my previous post, where I set up a thought experiment to work through the mechanics of FRB, and how it might (or […]

A Thought Experiment on Fractional Reserve Banking

Enrico in the comments of my FRB lecture writes: “if someone lends 100$ to a bank for a fixed time period, and then the bank makes a loan of 90$, no boom&bust cycle will happen. The reason is that the 90$ loan granted by the bank is “backed” by (at least) 90$ real savings from […]