| |
Shop
| |  |
|
Best Sellers
| | Home The Case Against the Fed | |
|  | |  | | | The Case Against the Fed | | | | | SKU:
| | In Stock | | Availability:
Usually ships in 1 business days | | | | | | The most powerful case against the American central bank ever written. This work begins with a mini-treatment of money and banking theory, and then plunges right in with the real history of the Federal Reserve System. Rothbard covers the struggle between competing elites and how they converged with the Fed. Rothbard calls for the abolition of the central bank and a restoration of the gold standard. His popular treatment incorporates the best and most up-to-date scholarship on the Fed's origins and effects. | | | |
List Price:
| | |
Our Price:
| $9.95
& eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25.
| |
You Save:
| |
| | |
|
| | Product Promotions | | |
| | Product Details | | Author: | Murray N. Rothbard | | Paperback: | 158 pages | | Publisher: | Ludwig Von Mises Institute | | Publication Date: | September 04, 2007 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 094546617X | | Package Length: | 8.4 inches | | Package Width: | 5.2 inches | | Package Height: | 0.4 inches | | Package Weight: | 0.5 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 53 reviews |
| |
| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review:
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
 Central Banks Are Wolves in Sheep's Clothing Mar 31, 2010
Murray Rothbard warns us about the inevitable result of central banks. He explains about government printing money to pay for its debts and the evil partnership of government and banks from Jekyll Island in 1910.
Americans have their head in the sand about problems we've had with central banks in the past. Andrew Jackson and others smashed them all for a reason.
The government is a runaway debt train - with the Fed and the banking cartel printing paper to fuel it.
I recommend other books by Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul - and two especially good educational books that explain why our Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution in the first place. "First Principles" by Thomas Tripp and "5000 Year Leap" by Skousen.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Some great information that I have not presented elsewhere Mar 25, 2010
On one hand I really enjoyed this book because it made me realize a kind of fraud being committed by the government in cooperation with the banking industry. Specifically, I had not realized, nor read elsewhere, how when banks lend out money deposited with them they are essentially counterfeiting. For example, when you entrust a fur coat to vault, you don't expect the vault owner to use that coat or lend it to someone else - if you see someone else with it, wouldn't you assume there were two of the coat - the one the other person is wearing and the one you own in the vault?
While this is true, and very bad, it is not as disastrous as presented. It is more an issue of disclosure. What people think of as demand deposits aren't deposits at all. They are in-fact more like certificates of deposit (CDs), but instead of a waiting period by contract, it is a waiting period by chance. If by chance too many people attempt to withdraw too much too soon, the house of cards collapses. Thus people must understand they are not safe. Further frauds, such as the FDIC, don't change that - they just defer the responsibility for the loss to the taxpayers.
A key issue surprisingly not presented was the fact that it is the government's inflating the money supply (making dollars continually worth less) that prevents people from choosing more prudently - who would pay to store money (if the money can't be lent, the depositor needs to pay to cover the cost of storage) when one would know that it would be worth less year after year? And people complain about a low savings rate today! Without inflation, the natural process is for all prices to decline over time - imagine how that would increase the savings rate - if the hundred dollars you save today would be able to buy two hundred dollars of goods in a few years (instead of 50)!
After some great information such as much of the above and how the government inflates the money supply, the book covers a long history of banking in the United States. Unfortunately, this history is rather bloated as the author tries to paint a major conspiracy theory with relationships such as "... had married into the wealthy Pruyn family of Albany, a family long connected with the Morgan-dominated New York Central Railroad." Thus way too much emphasis was placed on the whom and not enough on the what.
One key who that was mysteriously omitted was Ludwig Von Mises. Where was he (the person after whom the company who published the book was named) during all this? He was, from my understanding, an intelligent, pro-free market economist who turned 30 in 1911, right when this conspiracy to launch the Federal Reserve was hitting high gear.
In summary, I'd highly recommend reading about the first half of the book, and then the final section proposing a solution. But skip the long slow history of how the Morgans and the Rockefellers allegedly destroyed the financial system of the country. While it doesn't have the education about fractional reserve banking, all of the rest and more is presented somewhat clearer in Ron Paul's End the Fed.
7 of 8 found the following review helpful:
 I'm not sure his case was ever made Feb 26, 2010
Some people give negative ratings for a book if it doesn't match their political/economical philosophy. Just to be clear, I believe my overall political/economical philosophy is pretty similar to the author's, although Rothbard is more of an anarchist and I'm more of a classic Friedman-libertarian. But we're in the same ballpark, at least. So just to be clear, my rating of this book is not a disagreement with the author's premise, but really a rating on the quality of the writing, how well the author supported his logical conclusions, etc.
I give the book two stars primarily because I don't think Rothbard ever clearly stated the "case" against the Fed. Well over half of the book was merely a history lesson describing how the Fed came to be and who the major players were--but which contributed nothing to his overall "case" except that the Fed emanated from big-banking interests. Instead of spending time on the history lesson, I would've preferred to spend more time on the pros/cons of FDIC and a more thorough treatment of the discount window (which was literally just a footnote in this book). For instance, the author rails on FDIC, but it's hard to argue that bank runs are a thing of the past since FDIC--so if FDIC is abolished, and the Fed is abolished, how do we stop bank runs, which have been academically proven to cause real damage to an economy. I was hoping this book offered real alternatives that would still help protect the economy from bank runs, but I'm afraid that was never covered. The conclusion of the book was to abolish the Fed and FDIC, but the ramifications of this were made to seem negligible, discussed only over a page or two that over-simplified what abolishing the Fed and FDIC and going back to the gold standard would really mean.
In summary, I never felt like the author made the logical connections required to say conclusively that the Fed should be ended. And I really don't think he offered realistic alternatives. He basically called for a return to the gold standard, an abolition of the Fed and of FDIC, but with no discussion of how we can avoid damaging bank runs and cyclical confidence in banking without those institutions (which I believe is possible, but was simply never covered by the author).
What you don't know is... Feb 25, 2010
"The Case Against the Fed" is lay reader's guide for understanding why some think the Federal Reserve System is not needed. Rothbard, an economist, starts with a very readable explanation of how banking got started, then moves forward to our present system. With the stage set he then dives into the history of how the Federal Reserve System as we know it came to be; after which he explains how it works. The case he builds against the Federal Reserve System has to do with the foundations of the system: how it came into being, who spear-headed the movement, exactly what it does, and how this affects our money, our economy, and how it creates (that's right, creates) inflation rather than combatting it. This short and very readable book is essential reading for everyone as the Fed comes under more and more scrutiny by Congress and those seeking know how to avoid the cyclical recessions of the past 125 years.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Eye opening Feb 19, 2010
I have learned a lot from reading this book, and it explained and informed many of my investment decisions (I run a hedge fund) -- in the early 2009 my signals pointed at investing in the (apparently bankrupt) finance sector, which I did, with great success (not, sadly, as great in absolute terms as David Tepper, who made the same play). The fact of the matter was that the Fed had the interests of the big banks at heart, and these would not be allowed to fail, not because they were "too big to fail", but because the Fed (as made apparent by Rothbard) works for them. Interestingly, while there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over TARP, what has been completely ignored was the real government bank bailout, where the banks borrow money from the government (sorry, the Fed, an, um, independent, yeah, that's it..., entity) at 0% and lend it back to the government (meaning, us taxpayers) at 3.7% interest. This is the "trading income" (trade = "carry trade") which caused Goldman et al to post record profits last year.
I would also like to thank Thomas E Woods Jr (a frequent poster here) for turning me on to Rothbard and the Austrian School through his (highly recommended) book Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse
| |
| |
| |  | |  |
|
Recently Viewed | You may also like ...
|
