Free banking and credit creation: Implications for business cycle theory

Abstract

For the element of Time, which is the center of the chief difficulty of almost every economic problem, is itself absolutely continuous: Nature knows no partition of time into long periods and short; but the two shade into one another by imperceptible gradations, and what is the short period for one problem is a long period for another. (Marshall 1936) W hile the element of time may be the chief difficulty of almost every economic problem, the difficulties are most apparent and most persistently resist generally accepted solutions in the area of monetary theory and macroeconomics. Money, which simultaneously functions as a medium of exchange and a store of value, may be viewed as the quintessential present good or as a future good, the most liquid store of value. This dual nature of money has been the center of macroeconomic controversy since the time of the classical economists. The Austrian business cycle theory is a blend of monetary and capital theory and highlights coordination problems connected to “time and money.” In the framework developed by Ludwig von Mises, banks create money by creating credit. This created credit finances investment in excess of savings, distorts the structure of production, and sets the stage for the boom–bust cycle. But what is created credit and when and how do banks create credit? Different answers to this question yield different implications for business cycle theory, research, and monetary policy, as well as different monetary reform proposals. Section two examines the classical roots of the time, money,

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.