Ludwig von Mises Quotes

Depression is the aftermath of credit expansion.

The second evil arising from the practice of banking, has its origin, in the system of credit itself; and the shock which, as it is rounded on prevailing opinion, it is liable to receive from whatever shakes public confidence.

The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment.

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.

Some people are contriving ways and means of making us collapse.

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

It's the old Washington fiscal game of Jenga. You try to build as much debt as you can take, as much tax as you can take, until you topple the entire economy.

If you print money like in Zimbabwe... the purchasing power of money goes down, and the standards of living go down, and eventually, you have a civil war.

If the financial system collapses, it's really, really hard to put it back together again.

In this age, if the currency of a major nation collapses, or its access to borrowing ends, it just can't function.

I think, my generation, it's hard to have hope when you got a $700-trillion derivatives debt to pay and a bubble about to explode and $500 trillion worth of GDP.

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

The rhetoric on the Hill is getting very heated and it's getting quite dangerous. The gun is at the head of the American economy and Congress is holding it and its got a hair trigger. We've got to pay our bills.

Following Greece's defeat at the hands of Turkey in 1897, Greece's fiscal house was entrusted to a Control Commission. During the 20th century, the drachma was one of the world's worst currencies. It recorded the world's sixth highest hyperinflation. In October 1944, Greece's monthly inflation rate hit 13,800%.

There is no limit to the amount of money that can be created by the banking system, but there are limits to our productive facilities and our labor supply ...

Paper money never was beat.

Great prosperity is coming. It will be tremendously increased if we can extend reasonable credit to our customers.... To maintain our prosperity we must finance it.

When America went off the gold standard, its financial doom was sealed.

Credit is of pernicious consequence to that Nation, that uses or encourages it beyond Nature.

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose

The United States economy is like a poker game where the chips have become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and where the other fellows can stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit runs out the game will stop.

As 'Austrian' business cycle theory has pointed out, any bank credit inflation sets up conditions for boom-and-bust; there is no need for prices actually to rise.

The most famous and one of the most thoroughgoing opponents of bank credit was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson reacted to the panic of 1819 as a confirmation of his pessimistic views on banks.

The interest on our debt is going to collapse this country.

A United States collapse would be much different than a Greece collapse. Greece can collapse, and there's a ripple. We collapse, and the world feels it.