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Mix-Ansicht- Buch: A History of Money and Banking in the United States - - ELLI -, 14.11.2002, 00:01
Buch: A History of Money and Banking in the United States
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The Mises Institute is very pleased to announce the publication of a new work by Murray N. Rothbard: A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2002). This is not some dry statistical account of how the money supply variously expanded and shrunk. Rothbard explains banking history as only he can, as an exciting chronicle of glorious enterprise, variously marred by brazen swindles backed by the state, and leading to economic calamities of all sorts.
The current generation of Americans know the business cycle all too well: inflated prices in the financial sector and overbuilt capital goods, followed by a collapse in prices, capital-goods liquidation, and the onset economic doldrums. The cycle has been repeated many times in American history, and the cause—loose credit abetted by the banking sector—is always the same.
One reason the cause is so little understood is that there has been no comprehensive account of the history of banking in the United States that incorporates an understanding of the Austrian theory of the trade cycle and knowledge of the ways that politics distorts free markets. At last, we have just such a treatise from the hand of the master of American economic history.
Rothbard died in 1995, leaving several large manuscripts dedicated to American banking history. In the course of his career, meanwhile, he had published other pieces along the same lines, but they appeared in venues not readily accessible. Given the desperate need for a single volume that covers the topic, the Mises Institute put together this thrilling book, now available through the new Mises Institute online store.
Sections in this 500 page treatise:
I."The History of Money and Baking Before the Twentieth Century." This was Rothbard's contribution to the minority report of the US Gold Commission and treats the evolution of the US monetary system from its colonial beginnings.
II."Origins of the Federal Reserve." This thrilling paper lay unpublished for a long time and only recently appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. It is easily the most comprehensive account in print. It names names and shows the constellation of interest-group affiliations that led to its creation.
III."From Hoover to Roosevelt: The Federal Reserve and the Financial Elites." This previously unpublished paper goes into great detail on how the Morgan and Rockefeller financial interests shaped the political and behavior of the Fed.
IV."The Gold-Exchange Standard in the Interwar Years." This large section has appeared in print but not in its full version. Rothbard elucidates the reasons why the British and US government in the 1920s re-created the gold standard in a manner that was profoundly flawed and potentially inflationary (leading to the Great Depression).
V."The New Deal and the International Monetary System" This section appeared in a volume first published in 1976 and which is now very difficult to find. Rothbard argues that an abrupt shift occurred in monetary policy just before the US entered World War. He shows who benefited from the shift from dollar nationalism to dollar imperialism. He concludes with a smashing attack and expose of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944.
This book examines:
The origin of the word"dollar"
The boom-bust cycle long before the American Revolution
The wealthy merchants behind the Massachusetts Land Bank, an early inflationary scheme
The two abortive attempts to create a quasi-central bank early in a young nation
The meaning of the phrase"not worth a Continental"
Why those who wanted a central bank backed the overthrow of the Articles of Confederation
Why the founding fathers tried to suppress paper currency
The pernicious influence of Alexander Hamilton in using banking to centralize power
The government privileges enjoyed by the First and Second Banks of the United States
How the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian ideological movements succeeded in crushing the First and Second Banks of the US
Why the US"free banking" system of 1830 to 1860 was not really free
The awful consequences for money and economic life of the wars of 1776, 1812, 1860
The real reason for wildcat banking (this was not free enterprise at work)
The Connecticut banker who sued New York banks in 1816 for payment of notes and how the New York press savaged him
The correspondence between brilliant Philadelphia state senator Condy Raguet and the English economist David Ricardo
The Delaware Senator who rightly predicted that the Second Bank of the US would be"nothing more than simply a paper-making machine"
How the Panic of 1819 makes the collapse of the Nasdaq look mild by comparison
The wild shift between inflation and deflation and back again that last from 1838 to 1840
How California's and Oregon's early merchant settlers resisted and fought paper currency
The tax the post-Civil War national bank imposed to harm state banks, and those who became rich as a result
The political links between the advocates of high tariffs, soft money, and big government after the Civil War
The root cause of the panics of 1873, 1884, 1893, and 1907: reserve pyramiding and excess money creation
How the decade between 1880 and 1890 achieved high economic growth, along with falling prices
The hidden religious issues that divided inflationist and sound-money voters in the late 19th century (Catholics and Protestants disagreed on more than just theology)
The interest groups behind the demand for an"elastic" money supply
The originators of the view that capitalism leads to imperialism (no, not Lenin)
The takeover of the American economic profession by the German Historical School
Paper money as the secret goal of those who backed gold-exchange standard (as versus a real gold-coin standard)
The leading economists who naively blessed the creation of the Federal Reserve
Herbert Hoover: an early advocate of counter-cyclical policy
Hoover's ridiculous attack on short sellers
The Fed's unsuccessful attempt to inflate from 1929 to 1933 and the public's refusal to cooperate
Why the problem in 1930 was too little liquidation, not too much
How the Hoover campaign against hording delayed recovery
The power elite's shift to the left with the election of FDR
Economist Irving Fisher's personal stake in seeing the stock market reflated in the New Deal
The Morgan-Rockefeller war, how it led to New Deal central planning, and who won
How the New Deal roped the accounting profession into the regulatory state
The year the centralization of banking power moved from New York to DC
The drive for American exports and the economic causes of the Second World War
Keynes's foiled plot for a postwar global inflation
Conditions that could lead to a recreation of the currency blocs of the 1930s
The treatise includes an interpretative essay by economist Joseph Salerno, who explains how Rothbard's method of writing history departs substantially, and with great effect, from the conventional methods of doing economic history. To Rothbard, economic history is the working out of human action through the economic political sphere. To report only data and anonymous forces at work is to rob the narrative of its most crucial element.
Money and banking history was Rothbard specialization from graduate school and throughout his life. This book fulfills a project he began in his student years and engaged his scholarly energies until his final years. No account of the history of American banking is more informative, dramatic, and comprehensively enlightening as this one.
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