The most powerful case against the American central bank ever written. This work begins with a mini-treatment of money and banking theory, and then plunges right in with the real history of the Federal Reserve System. Rothbard covers the struggle between competing elites and how they converged with the Fed.

Rothbard calls for the abolition of the central bank and a restoration of the gold standard. His popular treatment incorporates the best and most up-to-date scholarship on the Fed's origins and effects.

The contents of this volume include:

Introduction: Money and Politics

The Genesis of Money

What is the Optimum Quantity of Money?

Monetary Inflation and Counterfeiting

Legalized Counterfeiting

Loan Banking

Deposit Banking

Problems for the Fractional-Reserve Banker: The Criminal Law

Problems for the Fractional-Reserve Banker: Insolvency

Booms and Busts

Types of Warehouse Receipts

Enter the Central Bank

Easing the Limits on Bank Credit Expansion

The Central Bank Buys Assets

Origins of the Federal Reserve: The Advent of the National Banking System

Origins of the Federal Reserve: Wall Steet Discontent

Putting Cartelization Across: The Progressive Line

Putting a Central Bank Across: Manipulating a Movement, 1897-1902

The Central Bank Movement Revives, 1906-1910

Culmination at Jekyll Island

The Fed at Last: Morgan-Controlled Inflation

The New Deal and the Displacement of the Morgans

Deposit "Insurance"

How the Fed Rules and Inflates

What Can Be Done?

Murray N. Rothbard, the author of 25 books and thousands of articles, was a historian, philosopher, and dean of the Austrian School of economics. The S.J. Hall Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he was also Academic Vice President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.