A rant by an author who does not accept the basics of banking and uses selective history to advance an argument of pure Austrian school theory. [332.110973] This short book takes only a few hours to read. To do so, however, is to waste those few hours. If you know something about banking, money, macroeconomics, or the Federal budget process, you will not learn anything from this book. If you do not know these things, you will not learn them here. The more disturbing fact is that the author was the chair of the House Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Technology.
The
book presents no logically constructed model or argument as to why the economy
would be more stable without the Fed. He
generally ignores historic periods when the U.S. did not have a central bank. His only argument is that prices have gone up since 1913 - a post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument blind to price movements before then. He has a fascination with the Exchange
Stabilization Fund, a $20 billion Treasury fund (small by the standards of the U.S. economy - the Treasury often borrows 3 to 4 times that amount in Treasury bills each week) that he suspects is being used
to manipulate global markets. A lot of
the book is a string of hypotheses and conspiracies. He opposes the use of fractional reserve banking; a concept that dates to the Renaissance.
The book seems to be quite popular, but I have no idea why. To read this book is to feel trapped at a family Thanksgiving dinner at which your great uncle, who has recently discovered the internet, holds forth for hours on things he has learned online. There are too many "it could be that ..." types of assertions. This book is for true believers who have no need of reason or facts.
This book is not recommended at any level.
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