Tom Duncan

“Free bankers have been fighting a war on two fronts. On one they face champions of central banking and managed money. On the other they struggle against advocates of 100-percent reserve banking. Although the second front is a lot smaller than the first, it’s far from being unimportant, in part because the battle there is […]

“In The Mystery of Banking, Murray Rothbard explained how the origins of central banking in the U.S. were rooted in a lobbying effort by Robert Morris and other “nationalists” to create a bank modeled after the Bank of England that would subsidize their businesses with cheap credit and other forms of corporate welfare. This paper […]

“As the House Budget Committee worked on a Republican plan to cut more than $6 trillion of government spending over a decade, the panel’s senior Democrat proposed a symbolic amendment saying national security costs should be included in any responsible deficit-reduction effort. Seventeen of 22 committee Republicans, including Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, joined all […]

“Mr. Frank’s bill is simple and remarkably short by Washington standards: two pages. It would strike the language in Section 12A of the Federal Reserve Act that provides for voting membership by the New York Fed and rotating voting membership by the other 11 Federal Reserve banks on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Monetary […]

“Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City President Thomas Hoenig, the central bank’s longest-serving policy maker, said the U.S. needs to raise interest rates to encourage individuals to save and avoid future asset bubbles. Hoenig, who doesn’t vote on monetary policy this year, has repeatedly urged the central bank to tighten lending to prevent inflation and […]

“Controlling overall inflation is a goal of monetary policy. Measures of overall, or headline, inflation attempt to include changes in the prices paid for a wide variety of goods—that is, what households actually have to pay for their daily purchases. This is a sensible notion of precisely what the central bank can and should control […]

“To begin, the national debt has provoked concern over the stability of US debt. Last month Standard and Poor’s revised its sovereign credit rating of the U.S. in the long-term from stable to negative. Last week the US reached its debt limit, which, justified or not, has perpetuated this anxiety. The cause of these fears […]

“The Fed is blaming the earthquake in Japan for disrupting first quarter global growth, plus droughts and other natural disasters which didn’t help. The problem for Bernanke and his allies on the Fed is that hardly anyone is buying this argument. Most financial analysts, economists, and CEOs are blaming inflation for the global slowdown, and […]

“‘Stagflation” is an ugly word for an ugly situation: persistent high inflation combined with high unemployment and stagnant demand in a country’s economy. The term was coined by British politician Iain Mcleod in a speech to Parliament in 1965. We haven’t experienced it here in the United States since the bad old days of the […]

“In ordinary times it would be ignorant to ask, “Who’s going to bail out the Fed?” — but then again these aren’t ordinary times. Solvency of the Federal Reserve Bank shouldn’t be an issue because it carries the full faith and credit of the United States of America. In theory, the only way the Fed […]