“Illinois Free Banking Experience”
“Recent studies by Rolnick and Weber (1983, 1984) have presented evidence challenging the conventional view of the Free Banking Era (1837-1863). The conventional view depicts a period of financial chaos in which lenient regulations gave rise to a pleth …
READ MORE“New Evidence on the Free Banking Era”
“The United States has experienced many periods of major banking panics during which a large number of banks have failed and financial markets have been in considerable disarray. The period consid-ered by many as the worst is the one period when banks …
READ MORE“Free Banking and Information Asymmetry”
“A traditional argument against free banking is that it will collapse because of information externalities: it is impossible for depositors to tell whether a high deposit rate offered by a bank is due to its high efficiency or risky lending strategy. T …
READ MORE“Free Banking and Monetary Control”
“Were free banking to reemerge today, it would probably be based, not on a gold standard, but on irredeemable paper (‘fiat’) base money issued by a former or extant central bank. Under this form of free banking, the price level is no longer given, and …
READ MOREReflections on Money
On Thursday, June 17, I attended a lecture by Dr. Benjamin Powell of Suffolk University. He spoke at the Charles G. Koch Foundation, giving one of his excellent lectures on Somalia and its Stateless society. While the lecture itself is well worth heari …
READ MORE“Monetary Central Planning and the State”
The Future of Freedom Foundation has an in-depth history of the debate over a monetary central authority. Dr. Richard Ebeling offers his stunning knowledge on the subject in a 40 part series entitled “Monetary Central Planning and the State”. To read h …
READ MORE“Free Banking for Zimbabwe”
“Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation is destroying the economy, pushing more of its inhabitants into poverty and forcing millions of Zimbabweans to emigrate. Since 1997, inflation has surged by 1,030,217%, while living standards (as measured by real GDP per capi …
READ MOREFree Banking in Britain
“Free banking, generically speaking, denotes a monetary system without a central bank, under which the issuing of currency is left to private banks. This book explores how this could work in practice by examining how this has worked historically, speci …
READ MOREGood Money
“This is the true and remarkable story of private coinage and banking in Britain in the early years of the Industrial Revolution (1775-1850). Making money was a business in demand. The needs of business for small denominations were changing. Merchants …
READ MOREGeorge Selgin – Central Banks as Sources of Financial Instability
“The present financial crisis has set in bold relief the Jekyll and Hyde nature of contemporary central banks. It has made apparent both our utter dependence on such banks as instruments for assuring the continuous flow of credit in the aftermath of a …
READ MORELawrence H. White – Sound Money and Free Banking
On April 19, 2010, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and the GMU Economics Society hosted a lecture by Lawrence H. White. Dr. White presented on the subject of sound money, it’s importance and historical origins, and how a free banking system prod …
READ MOREThe Rationale of Central Banking and the Free Banking Alternative
“In the present century centralised banking systems have come to be regarded as the usual concomitant, if not one of the conditions of the attainment of an advanced stage of economic development. The belief in the desirability of central bank organisat …
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