Sound Money Project

“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,…

“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.…

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…

“Neoclassical treatments of inflation understate the costs associated with inflation, even at very low levels. A comparative institutions perspective that recognizes the epistemological properties of prices and the institutional process by which inflation takes place, reveals the costs of inflation to be both larger and more widespread than standard treatments suggest. This paper makes use…

“There is much evidence that common stock returns and inflation have been negatively related during the post-1953 period. Zvi Body, Jeffrey Jaffe and Gershon Mandelker, Charles Nelson, and my article with G. William Schwert document negative relations between between stock returns and both the expected and unexpected components of inflation. These results are puzzling given…

“President Obama rammed through his new stimulus bill, warning of an irreversible recession if Congress failed to act. But bestselling author Thomas E. Woods Jr. warns that Obama’s “stimulus package” will do far more damage to our economy than even the Republicans in Congress realize. In his New York Times bestseller, Meltdown, Woods shows how…

“Currency crises have become more and more frequent in part because speculators can mobilize more and more money. A generation ago, central banks, like the U.S. Federal Reserve System, had more money than anyone else and weren’t afraid to use it to punish speculators. Today, big currency speculators like Mr. Soros can borrow more money…

Ron Paul talks inflation and economics with CNN.

“Nobel Economics Laureate F.A. Hayek summed up the enigma of money succinctly: “Money, the very “coin” of ordinary interaction, is [hence] of all things the least understood and—perhaps with sex—the object of greatest unreasoning fantasy; and like sex it simultaneously fascinates, puzzles and repels.” John Maynard Keynes was right about money before he was wrong…

Are monetary and banking problems due to a few misguided policies or incompetent managers? Or are there fundamental flaws in monetary and financial institutions, principally central banks and the legal and monetary frameworks that accompany them? “Gold Standard Policy and Limited Government” Richard H. Timberlake, Jr. Found in: Money and the Nation State ed. Kevin…

“My essay on causes of the financial mess focused on trying to identify the initial “impulses” that set the boom-bust cycle in motion because (as this symposium shows) economists have a variety of views about the impulses, and because identifying them correctly is our best hope for avoiding policy mistakes going forward.  Nonetheless I agree…