Murray Rothbard Quotes

At present, financial crises occur, chiefly because the paper currency is redeemable in gold only.

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

We have lost control over the financial system ... by printing much more money than in previous years.

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.

I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life, like radioactive elements.

Believe me, the next step is a currency crisis because there will be a rejection of the dollar, the rejection of the dollar is a big, big event, and then your personal liberties are going to be severely threatened.

We print money. The people that print the money is actually us. The government of the United States of America. By its very nature, we control that, and this system is there as representation of us.

The one thing people don't appreciate, I think, is that central banking is not a new development. It's been around for a very long time.

We have one of the highest interest rates in the world, and we owe more money per capita than any other country. All we need is a nail hole in the bottom of the boat and we're sunk.

There are only three ways to meet the unpaid bills of a nation. The first is taxation. The second is repudiation. The third is inflation.

Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States

When the government runs out of lenders, it can do something that households are forbidden to do: print money.

Look at the Weimar Republic and their hyperinflation in the early '20s. It didn't happen overnight. I've used the analogy, it's a lot like soybeans: you plant 'em, you wait. Conditions take some time. You need some sun; you need some water, but ultimately things start to grow, and are we in that phase or not?

We want a money that some government mandarin can't just whisk into existence with a pen stroke.

I worked on one speech about the financial system that caused the Dow to drop, like, 200 points.

Forget quantitative easing - I've always thought the idea of injecting virtual money into the system is an accident waiting to happen.

Printing money is merely taxation in another form.

Throughout the 19th century, when there was a laissez-faire mentality and insufficient regulation, you had one crisis after another. Each crisis brought about some reform. That is how central banking developed.

Credit is a promise to deliver money. It will produce GDP but you'll create credit... So you reach a certain point that that you can't do that anymore... There are choices. And how do we best support, apportion the money? How much is going to be transferred?

The job of the Central Bank is to worry.

Businesses that have gone through an episode of hyperinflation become understandably alert to the threat of it: at the first hint of inflation, they're likely to increase prices, since they've learned that if they don't, and inflation hits, their businesses will be wrecked.

The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely.

Economies typically do not function well in hyperinflation. The real value of government debt might disappear, but the economy is likely to disappear with it.

The Fed is the major U.S. firefighter. It's not the Treasury. It's not the Congress. We certainly saw that vividly in 2008.

Market forces will one day crush the Federal Reserve. One day, the market forces will reverse.