Sound Money Project
The Sound Money Project was founded in January 2009 to conduct research and promote awareness about monetary stability and financial privacy. The project is comprised of leading academics and practitioners in money, banking, and macroeconomics. It offers regular commentary and in-depth analysis on monetary policy, alternative monetary systems, financial markets regulation, cryptocurrencies, and the history of monetary and macroeconomic thought.
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Price “Stability” for Venezuela
In something of a reversal of the usual government policies to keep prices high, the government of Venezuela is going to great lengths to keep prices low, even in the face of inflation. According to CNN, The Venezuelan bolivar currency, which had been fixed at 2.15 to the U.S. dollar since 2005, was devalued to…
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“Inflation: The Silent Tax”
“Inflation is a tax on financial assets. This tax is paid by those unlucky investors, corporations, and foreign central banks that hold financial assets denominated in the currency that is inflating. A simple way of thinking about inflation as a tax is to consider investing in a mutual fund. The fund manager might charge 1…
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“Sound Money and a Liberal Market Order”
“Though circumstances and times change, the basic principles of economic progress and sound market order do not. There is no mystery about them. They involve sound money, low taxes, property rights, making it easy for businesses to be set up, and, once they are, not harassing them with excessive regulation and bureaucratic interference. And, of…
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“Income During Inflation”
“Even as the Dow sits above 10,000, the public remains justifiably anxious about the state of the economy. The Federal Reserve has worked overtime to convince the public that it has saved the economy from a meltdown, but with unemployment at a 26-year high and the dollar tanking, it’s a hard sell. What most people…
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“Capitalism Needs a Sound-Money Foundation”
“Let’s go back to the gold standard. If the very idea seems at odds with what is currently happening in our country — with Congress preparing to pass a massive economic stimulus bill that will push the fiscal deficit to triple the size of last year’s record budget gap — it’s because a gold standard…
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Murray N. Rothbard and Jacksonian Banking
Murray N. Rothbard was the consummate scholar in several fields. From my first meeting with Murray Rothbard, attending Ludwig von Mises seminar at New York University, more than forty years before the sadness of his death, I knew him longest as an economic historian.
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“The Fed and the Crisis: A Reply to Ben Bernanke”
“Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke spent most of his speech to the American Economic Association on Jan. 3 responding to the critique that easy monetary policy during 2002-2005 contributed to the housing boom, to excessive risk taking, and thereby to the financial crisis. Many have expressed the view that monetary policy was too easy…
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“The Roaring Twenties and the Bullish Eighties”
“There are significant parallels between the Roaring 1920s and the Bullish 1980s. Both decades were characterized by a policy-induced artificial boom that ended with an inevitable bust. The Federal Reserve had a hand in both episodes, keeping the interest rate artificially low in the first one and keeping Treasury bills artificially risk-free in the second.…
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How the Gold Standard Worked, 1880-1913
“This essay reinterprets the gold standard by applying the monetary theory of the balance of payments to the experience of the two most important countries on it, America and Britain. Before explaining, testing and using the theory in detail, it will be useful to indicate a few of the ways in which accepting it will…
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“Sound Money the Safeguard of Labor”
“This government is now on a gold basis; that is to say, the nation stands pledged to redeem all its debts or obligations in gold. This is not the result of arbitrary legislation on our part, but a necessity imposed by the demands of trade and commerce. Foreign purchasers of American products pay in gold,…
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“Capital Theory, Inflation, and Deflation: The Austrians and Monetary Disequilibrium Theory Compared”
“It can be argued that two apparently divergent macroeconomic schools of thought that have persisted in the history of economics are both part of a larger theoretical view which is capable of meeting most of these criteria. The Austrian theory of the trade cycle as described by Ludwig von Mises (1912, 1966) and F. A.…
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“Another Perspective on the Effects of Inflation Uncertainty”
This paper examines the effects of inflation uncertainty on real economic activityb y utilizing a flexible, dynamic,m ultivariatef rameworkt hata ccom-modates possible interaction between the conditional means and variances. The empirical model is based on a familiar identified vector autoregressive framework, modified to accommodate multivanate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity Our empirical model is preferred to…
