gold standard

In an interview with Louis James, the inimitable Doug Casey throws cold water on those celebrating the economic recovery.

In yesterday's lecture, Federal Reserve Chairman rejected the idea that a return to a gold standard is desirable or practical. His pointed remarks come as Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has fanned ideas in some quarters of the…

We (also) do not want black helicopters flying around dropping bags of cash; and we (also) oppose government “pump-priming” demand stimulus—the libertarians and Austrians and even Milton Friedman are correct in their argument that this…

Milton Friedman's 1948 article, "A Monetary and Fiscal Framework for Economic Stability" put forward a proposal according to which the government would run a balanced budget only at full employment, with deficits in recession and surpluses…

Investment advisor John Mauldin explains his attitude towards austerity measures; a return of the gold standard; the euro crisis; and the willingness to bailout everyone that makes capitalism and monetary systems stop working.

The last post by Randall Wray below is an interesting one because it points out how the world has changed since the end of the gold standard and why the sovereign debt crisis is centered in the euro zone. While I have an Austrian bias…

A unilateral exit would be a devastating event for Italy and the euro zone. Inflation would be high but bank and national solvency issues would recede. If the exit were done under these nationalistic pre-conditions of redomination, most of…

The quantity of debt grows as the quality recedes. The problem of bad loans is no longer just the pre-2008 mortgages, CDOs, and LBOs. Debt issued after the bust is defaulting, such as Greek sovereign bonds, issued in June 2010. Some…

The question after the frightful period in 1907 was what to do to prevent another panic from causing a severe depression. Benjamin Strong, a senior executive at Bankers Trust and later the first President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New…

On a floating exchange rate, the government’s own IOUs—currency—are nonconvertible in the sense that the government makes no promise to convert them to precious metal, to foreign currency, or to anything else. Instead, it promises only to…