Recorded in Birmingham, Alabama on April 22, 2023.
From the Mises Institute’s recent event in Birmingham, Alabama dedicated to the global threat of "The Great Reset".

[embedded content]

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Suppose an addict had the ability to magically create, ex nihilo, his own stimulating drug, as fractional reserve banks can do with money and credit. Would you expect moderation?

Original Article: "Why Fractional Reserve Banking Is behind Bank Failures"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. 

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Drug addicts suffer major withdrawal symptoms when they go cold turkey. In the case of high-tech startups and their banks (like Silicon Valley Bank), the super-low-interest-rate stimulant has been taken away by the drug dealer (the Fed) via interest rate hikes. With cheap credit drying up, firms switched to pulling cash out of SVB, all while the same interest rate increases caused the value of SVB’s assets to fall. SVB’s balance sheet couldn’t handle the fast withdrawals, which became a classic, self-propagating, panicky bank run, and the simultaneous fall in value of its liquid assets.
When banks practice this kind of maturity mismatch—potentially immediate-term liabilities (deposits) backed by long-term assets (loans and Treasury securities), it is called

“Every change in the money relation alters … the conditions of the individual members of society. Some become richer, some poorer.” – Mises, Human Action, p. 414.
New money enters the economy at a particular point. It does not enter in the form of a proportional and simultaneous increase in everybody’s incomes. This means that there are uneven effects of monetary expansion, including exacerbated income and wealth inequality. When we trace the consequences of monetary expansion, we notice that it creates winners and losers as resources are shifted toward the first receivers and spenders of new money.
This idea is an old one. It goes back to Richard Cantillon, who in the mid-eighteenth century outlined the step-by-step process that new money works its way into an