The mystery of banking
The Mystery of Banking is a great expert analysis of the modern fractional-reserve banking system and its origins-how it is unstable, how it exacerbates business cycles, and how it causes inflation. This book lays out the devastating effects of this most common form of banking on the lives of every man, woman, and child.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
9mentions
8people
2009–2023years
89% recommend11% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Read Rothbart's Mystery of Banking, https://mises.org/library/mystery-banking. Or Mises' Human Action.
- The Federal Reserve is a pretty centralized banking system.
To your point, however, the US has had prosperous period of its history with free (I.e. no central/federal control) banking. See Rothbard's "The Mystery of Banking."
- Get some conflicting ideas. Two great, short books are The Mystery of Banking by Rothbard (available for free here: https://mises.org/library/mystery-banking) and Economics in One Lesson by Hazlitt (free here: https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson/). They both conflict quite substantially with the mainstream and might open up a whole new line of inquiry for you.
- I felt the same way when I discovered bitcoin last year. Here are some books that I read that helped:
* "End the Fed" by Ron Paul
* "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt
* "The Mystery of Banking" by Murray Rothbard
* "What has government done with our money?" by Murray Rothbard
* "Debt: The First 5000 Years" by David Graeber
- It makes perfect sense that most people in the top 0.1% are associated with the financial and banking industries if you know how banks work. Banks, and the Federal Reserve, create new money. They give this money to themselves, and then loan it out. This is as bad as, and effectively equivalent to, counterfeiting. Creating new money, i.e. counterfeiting, i.e. inflation, does not create new wealth. It merely changes the distribution of the purchasing power of the money away from most people who have the money and to the people who get the new money. This is where the wealth of the top 0.1% comes from. Freshly printed money. It is a terrible system. The people with the highest wealth are not contributing in proportion to their wealth. Rather, they are stealing their wealth from the bottom 99.9% by stealing their purchasing power by printing new money.
If you would like to read a thorough argument about how fractional reserve banks and the Federal Reserve are scams, read "The Mystery of Banking" by Murray Rothbard. Google it and you will see it is available for free at mises.org.
For some reason this subject is very polarized and I get downvoted whenever I explain this. Don't downvote me just because you are uncomfortable with what I'm saying. Note that I am not ignorant. I have learned about economics. It just so happens that when trying to understand the issues myself, I have arrived conclusions that are not mainstream. But they are the correct conclusions in so far as I presently understand.
- > I finally broke down and included my "Man, Economy, and State" by Murray N. Rothbard
Too dense for me, reading pace was too slow. It's good, but reading it is hard work. I'd recommend "Mystery of Banking" first, which is smaller in scope, easy to read, very informative.
Free here:
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