We have already described one part of the contemporary flight from sound, free market money to statized and inflated money: the abolition of the gold standard by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, and the substitution of fiat paper tickets by the Federal Reserve as our “monetary standard.” Another crucial part of this process was the federal cartelization of the nation’s banks through the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913. Banking is a particularly arcane part of the economic system; one of the problems is that the word “bank” covers many different activities, with very different implications. During the Renaissance … Continue reading Fractional-Reserve Banking