PREVIEW

Deflation and Liberty (Audiobook - MP3 CD) (CD/ MP3)

Product Overview

This is the audio book version on MP3 CD.

This monograph addresses a critically important issue: the prevailing view that deflation (falling prices and/or falling money stock) is a catastrophe that must be stopped. Jorg Guido Hulsmann shows that deflation is nothing to fear. The government should permit it to happen as a path to economic recovery and even as a tool to reform. Institutions that are liquidated in deflation need to be liquidated, and that includes banks and other financial institutions as well.

The essay covers a surprisingly vast theoretical territory in a short space, including the nature of money and interest, the boom and bust, the impossibility of stabilization measures, and the economic tends of the recession. He goes further than any previous writer in arguing that no measures of any kind should be undertaken to cure the bust through money creation, even under conditions of falling prices and falling money stock. His rationale is both economic and political.

"Deflation is not inherently bad, and that it is therefore far from being obvious that a wise monetary policy should seek to prevent it, or dampen its effects, at any price. Deflation creates a great number of losers, and many of these losers are perfectly innocent people who have just not been wise enough to anticipate the event. But deflation also creates many winners, and it also punishes many "political entrepreneurs" who had thrived on their intimate connections to those who control the production of fiat money.

About the Author(s)

Jorg Guido Hulsmann, professor of economics at the University of Paris (Angers), tells the full story of his dramatic and inspiring life and contributions – and in the course of it, provides not only a reconstruction of the history of the Austrian School of economics of which Mises was the leading expositor, and not only of the entire history of economic thought on the Continent and the United States, but also of the political and intellectual history of the 20th century.