Talk about great timing. Rothbard's extraordinary book unravels the mystery of banking: what is legitimate enterprise and what is a government-backed shell game that can't last. His explanation is clear enough for anyone to follow and yet precise and rigorous enough to be the best textbook for college classes on the topic. This is because its expositional clarity--in its history and theory--is essentially unrivaled.

Most notably, he uses the T account method of explaining the relationship between deposits and loans, showing the inherent instability of fractional reserve banking and how it sets the stage for centralization, inflation, and the boost-bust cycle.

But there is more here. It is an explanation of money's origins and its meaning in the free market. The abstract theory is here but always with real application in history and in modern banking practice. Never does a paragraph go by without an example drawn from his massive knowledge of the subject.

Even further, he explains the integration between microeconomics and the business cycle. As Douglas French writes in the introduction: "Although first published 25 years ago, Murray Rothbard’s The Mystery of Banking continues to be the only book that clearly and concisely explains the modern fractional reserve banking system, its origins, and its devastating effects on the lives of every man, woman, and child. It is especially appropriate in a year that will see a surge in bank failures, central banks around the globe bailing out failed commercial and investment banks, double-digit inflation rates in many parts of the world and hyperinflation completely destroying Zimbabwe’s economy, that a new edition of Rothbard’s classic work be republished and made available through the efforts of Lew Rockwell and the staff at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Priced affordably for students and laymen interested in the vagaries of banking and how inflation and business cycles are created."

Further, Joseph Salerno explains in the Foreword: "The Mystery of Banking is perhaps the least appreciated work among Murray Rothbard’s prodigious body of output. This is a shame because it is a model of how to apply sound economic theory, dispassionately and objectively, to the origins and development of real-world institutions and to assess their consequences. It is “institutional economics” at its best. In this book, the institution under scrutiny is central banking as historically embodied in the Federal Reserve System—the “Fed” for short—the central bank of the United States.

"Rothbard’s presentation of the basic principles of money-and-banking theory in the first eleven chapters of the book guides the reader in unraveling the mystery of how the central bank operates to create money through the fractional-reserve banking system and how this leads to inflation of the money supply and a rise in overall prices in the economy. But he does not stop there. In the subsequent five chapters he resolves the historical mystery of how an inherently inflationary institution like central banking, which is destructive of the value of money and, in the extreme case of hyperinflation, of money itself, came into being and was accepted as essential to the operation of the market economy."

Incredibly, both authors correctly anticipate the current crisis -- and Rothbard explains it all and shows the way out. This is certainly the book for today, more essential than ever before.

莫瑞•罗斯巴德（Murray Rothbard），奥地利经济学派的代表人物，生前主要担任美国内华达大学经济学教授。曾任米塞斯研究院学术事务副会长，《奥地利经济学评论》编辑，拥有哥伦比亚大学学士、硕士和博士学位。他参与纽约大学举办的米塞斯研讨会达十多年，罗斯巴德一生著述甚丰，他的著作对于现代的自由意志主义和无政府资本主义理论有著极大贡献。重要著作包括：《1819年大恐慌》(The Panic of 1819)、《人、经济与国家》(Man，Economy,and State)、《美国大萧条》(America’s Great Depression)、《权力与市场》(Power and Market)、《自由的道德》(The Ethics of Liberty)、《在自由中孕育》(Conceived in Liberty)等。