Check out this clip from Caitlin Long of Custodia Bank at a Bitcoin conference last year, explaining the dangers of highly leveraged crypto exchanges like FTX. Long calls out the practices of Sam Bankman-Fried, while sharing a stage with the disgraced crypto trader.
Why was Long able to see what most of the financial world, including major financial institutions, couldn't? She's read her Ludwig von Mises. As she explains, there is a fundamental difference between "commodity money" and "circulation money," which Mises calls "fiduciary media" in his treatise A Theory of Money and Credit.
Written over 100 years ago, the consequences of leveraged fractional reserve banking and the artificial increase in credit remain. Mises's work remains vital in a world of hedonistic central banks and a financial world shaped by the dangerous fallacies of bad economists.
As Mises noted in this important work, "No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as an attempt to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future."
Get your copy of Theory of Money and Credit today from the Mises Bookstore.
ecome a Member and SAVE all year long!