A History of Money and Banking in the United States is a book by economist Murray Rothbard

Murray Rothbard

Murray Newton Rothbard was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the...

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From the introduction by Joseph Salerno

Joseph Salerno

Joseph T. Salerno is an Austrian School economist in the United States. A professor at Pace University, Salerno is an active scholar in the areas of banking and monetary theory, comparative economics, and the history of economic thought.-Early life:...

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Pre-20th Century

Part 1, "The History of Money and Banking Before the Twentieth Century", consists of Rothbard’s contribution to the minority report of the U.S. Gold Commission and treats the evolution of the U.S. monetary system from its colonial beginnings to the end of the nineteenth century. In this part, Rothbard gives a detailed account of two early and abortive attempts by the financial elites to shackle the young republic with a quasi-central bank. He demonstrates the inflationary consequences of these privileged banks, the First and Second Banks of the United States, during their years of operation, from 1791 to 1811 and from 1816 to 1833, respectively. Rothbard then discusses the libertarian Jeffersonian and Jacksonian ideological movements that succeeded in destroying these statist and inflationist institutions. This is followed by discussions of the era of comparatively free and decentralized banking that extended from the 1830s up to the Civil War, and the pernicious impact of the war on the U.S. monetary system. Part 1 concludes with an analysis and critique of the post–Civil War National Banking System. Rothbard describes how this regime—which was aggressively promoted by the investment banking firm that had acquired the monopoly of underwriting government bonds—centralized banking and destabilized the economy, resulting in a series of financial crises that prepared the way for the imposition of the Federal Reserve System.

Origins of the Federal Reserve

Part 2 on "Origins of the Federal Reserve" is a paper that lay unpublished for a long time and appeared in an issue of The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

The Fed and financial elites

Part 3 contains a formerly unpublished paper, "From Hoover to Roosevelt: The Federal Reserve and the Financial Elites." Here, Rothbard identifies the financial interests and ideology that drove the Fed to engineer an almost uninterrupted expansion of the money supply from the moment of its inception in 1914 through 1928. This part also includes an analysis of how concordance and conflict between the Morgan and Rockefeller financial interests shaped the politics and behavior of the Fed during the Hoover administration and the first Roosevelt administration as well as international monetary and domestic banking and financial policies under the latter administration.

The Gold-Exchange Standard

Part 4, "The Gold-Exchange Standard in the Interwar Years", previously was published as a chapter in a collection of papers on money and the State. The paper appears here for the first time in its original and unexpurgated version. Rothbard elucidates the reasons why the British and U.S. governments in the 1920s so eagerly sought to reconstruct the international monetary system on the basis of this profoundly flawed and inflationary caricature of the classical gold standard. Rothbard also analyzes the "inner contradictions" of the gold-exchange-standard system that led inexorably to its demise in the early 1930s.

The New Deal and the International Monetary System

"The New Deal and the International Monetary System" is the topic of the fifth and concluding part of the book and was previously published in an edited book of essays on New Deal

New Deal

The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...

 foreign policy. Rothbard argues that an abrupt shift occurred in the international monetary policy of the New Deal just prior to U.S. entry into World War II. He analyzes the economic interests that promoted and benefited from the radical transformation of New Deal policy, from "dollar nationalism" during the 1930s to the aggressive "dollar imperialism" that prevailed during the war and culminated in the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944.

Release history

• A History of Money and Banking in the United States. Ludwig von Mises Institute
  Ludwig von Mises Institute
  The Ludwig von Mises Institute , based in Auburn, Alabama, is a libertarian academic organization engaged in research and scholarship in the fields of economics, philosophy and political economy. Its scholarship is inspired by the work of Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises...
  
  . August 30, 2002. ISBN 0-945466-33-1.

Full text

• A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II Full text (510 pages) in pdf format

External links

• Full text of the Introduction by Joseph Salerno (HTML format)
• David Gordon's 2002 Review of A History of Money and Banking
• Review of 2002 Edition by Joseph Stromberg.