My wife and I recently drove just shy of three thousand miles to see friends and family in the American Midwest. We started just outside Philadelphia, located in the southeast corner of Pennsylvania on America’s east coast. Our furthest point west was Iowa City, Iowa, about a hundred miles west of the Mississippi River. Our furthest point north was Madison, Wisconsin, about sixty miles north of the Illinois/Wisconsin border. Our furthest point south was Owensville, Missouri, about a hundred miles southwest of St Louis.   The following notes are merely our observations along the way ..read more

  Before delving into the dangers of eliminating cash and mandating that all transactions be conducted by digital means, let us briefly discuss the legal aspects of money. In the United States, as in all economies that have legal tender laws, only cash is recognized as money. Some may think that the balance of their bank accounts is money too, but that is not quite the case. Your bank balance is one step removed from legal money.   All banks must maintain minimum balances of reserves, either in cash held in their vaults or in their “reserve accounts” with their local Federal Reserve ..read more

  Leaders of the Western democracies are unprepared to deal with forces that will end the fiat dollar’s dominance as the preferred medium of international trade settlement, in place since the end of the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1971.   The BRICS summit, currently taking place in Johannesburg, South Africa, is expected to include an agreement on a first step toward establishing an alternative international trade settlement system based on commodities, which would certainly include gold. Dozens of non-Western and even some Western affiliated nations are attending with great interest ..read more

  Since the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944 the dollar has been the world’s preferred reserve currency; i.e., the major trading nations of the world were willing to hold dollars in vast amounts to satisfy their need for a readily accepted worldwide payment medium. Even when in 1971 the US had violated its solemn promise to redeem its dollars for gold at thirty-five dollars per ounce, nations still were willing to hold dollars.   Germany Shies Away from Monetary Leadership   In the mid-2010’s I was certain that Germany would abandon the Euro and reinstate the Deutsche Mark. It wa ..read more

  The Promise and Betrayal of Bretton Woods   The US dollar has been the world’s premier reserve currency since the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944. Until 1971 it was redeemable by foreign central banks in gold at $35 per ounce. As long as the US did not print more dollars than it could redeem in gold at that price, all was well. But, as Henry Hazlitt predicted, the US did print more dollars and was forced either to abandon gold redeemability or to devalue the dollar to gold at some higher exchange rate. In 1971 President Nixon chose to abandon gold redeemability. This nefarious act ..read more

  Sound Money Is Required for Real Budget Discipline TAGS Big GovernmentThe FedInflationMoney and BanksPolitics LEE ESTO EN ESPAÑOL 06/15/2023Patrick Barron Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. News here in the USA has been full of the latest farce known as raising or not raising the debt ceiling. After the usual dog-and-pony show, a budget deal was reached. But was it progress? It was a foregone conclusion that the debt ceiling would be raised, yet again, for the simple mathematical reason that unless the budget is cut, via ..read more

Re: Cato's Letter, Winter 2023, Volume 21, Number 1..."Liberty, Optimism, and Superabundance" by Lawrence Summers "I was skeptical about Larry Summers writing in your latest Cato's Journal about "Liberty, Optimism, and Superabundance". Turns out I was right. After endorsing the "incredible outcomes" that "markets and science produce", he claimed that this "is not to say that those outcomes cannot be made better through collective and planned action." Really? Such as building a better ball point pen, an example Summers used to highlight market success? How about the collective and planned prog ..read more

 From: Patrick Barron Sent: Sunday, January 29, 2023 9:54 AM To: NY Times <letters@nytimes.com> Subject: A tale of two healthcare systems   Dear Sirs: Your January 29, 2023 New York Times Magazine contains two articles about healthcare. The first article was written by David Wallace-Wells and uses the failures of Britain's healthcare system as evidence that "austerity" doesn't work. (Five hundred patients per week are dying because of E.R. waits. Ambulances are taking an hour and a half to respond to stroke and heart-attack calls. Ten times as many patien ..read more

Re: Mr. Jim Tankersley's front page, above-the-fold, article of "How the U.S. Amassed Debt of $31 trillion, published on Sunday, January 22, 2023. I was disappointed that Mr. Tankersley never did answer his own question. Reporting that both Republicans and Democrats spent more and more year after year does answer how that can happen. So, let me enlighten Mr. Tankersley and the Times' readers. The Fed's monetary base, composed of bank reserves and cash, grew from $.910 trillion on September 2008 to $5.419 trillion on November 2022. M3, the most inclusive metric of the nation's money supply, gr ..read more

  According to Wikipedia, Bernie Madoff ran the world’s largest Ponzi scheme, with losses estimated to be as high as $65 billion. Madoff promised to invest his customers’ money in productive enterprises and pay them generous returns, when in fact he spent the money and manufactured fake statements. His generous returns to his customers were made with money from new customers. Eventually the scheme collapsed when money from new entrants slowed down. There were no productive investments to pay off his customers.   Like Madoff’s scam, Social Security is a vast Ponzi scheme. Although it ..read more