While the Federal Reserve prints more money to buy more things for the political establishment, the rest of us work to provide them with the resources they need for less pay in terms of purchasing power. So what can we do about it? Can we create alternatives to the Federal Reserve System?
Today, after record prices hit the everyday goods Americans use – food, housing, gas; everyone is familiar with the I-word. However, Americans are struggling to understand how inflation happens and why it matters so much.
As the Mercatus Center’s Scott Sumner often says, one ought never to reason from a price change. Interest rates, like other prices, can change for all sorts of reasons; the implications of the change generally depend on the particular reason for such a change.
Are interest rates not prices? And if so, should they not be discovered instead of imposed?
[Alexander Hamilton] was decidedly retrograde in pushing for an exclusive nationwide bank with a sweetheart government deal. He was not a creative policy genius so much as a persuasive second-hand dealer in discredited mercantilist ideas.
The Federal Reserve has been in the news a lot lately because of its attempts at conducting monetary policy in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In December of 2015 the Fed’s policy-making body, the Federal Open Market Committee, voted for the first time in 7 years to raise the interest rate on bank […]
“Is Now the Time to Kill the $100 Bill?” That’s the title of a Wednesday, February 17 article in the Wall Street Journal, prompted in part by a blog post from former Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence H. Summers.The article states that the Treasury Department has no current plans to eliminate the $100 bill, so […]