Monetary Kaleidics: Reflections on Money Illusion and the War on Cash Kindle Edition

It’s the calm before the storm. The next recession is coming, and the Austrians must be prepared. Since 2009, their forecasts of imminent collapse and hyperinflation have fallen on deaf ears, and for good reason. These predictions were premature and too short-sighted despite being based on a valid business cycle theory.

Who’s to blame for the next crisis? The Federal Reserve? Fractional reserve banking? The typical Austrian answer is both. Each creates the scourge known as inflation, and this begins the boom and bust cycle. But something is missing from this broader Austrian perspective: kaleidics. Without appreciating the complex nature of money and how it can unleash a devastating deflationary rot on our economy, some free market economists are willing to throw the baby out with the bath water. This book aims to right these wrongs of the Austrian past by taking the best of the tradition and combining it with new and important insights. Aspiring scholars can use this original contribution to advance the Austrian school beyond what Mises and Rothbard had envisioned.

In his debut book, Monetary Kaleidics, author Michael Hoffman explores questions including:

• Why the Austrian school has stagnated in the last decade and how it can recapture the prestige it had during the marginal revolution.
• How to profit from negative interest rates in the War on Cash with an alternative understanding of Gresham’s law.
• What entrenched wages are and why they matter in a free market.
• Why monetary disequilibrium theory is important to the future of the Austrian movement.
• How a local currency can help alleviate unemployment during a recession and enhance the price mechanism.

Question everything. What we need is a new path. A different vision. The old doctrines have gotten us this far, but economics and money are not so easy to understand. This new contribution to the Austrian tradition will help you see through the money illusion into a complex world that’s in constant flux; just like a kaleidoscope.