I found a comment for this book on Amazon.com, here it is..
"Woods claims that boom-bust economic cycles are solely caused by centralized government banking. How do you explain the Panics of 1837, 1853, and 1873, then, all of which were worse than the Great Depression, and all of which took place when there was no central bank whatever? "
What do you all think of it? I’m new to studying econ, so forgive me for not giving my thoughts.
Here I’ll address 1837: http://mises.org/journals/scholar/trask1.pdf
Fractional reserve banking. Which has its origins in government priviledge and hence, are in one regard, centralized government banking.
Don’t forget that we theorize that credit expansion causes recessions (though there are other causes that it could be blamed on such as messing with a gold standard), and banks have been expanding their credit all by themselves through various ways. Also, Pre-FED (about 1860’s-1913) we had a quasi-central bank.
You beat me to it.
Fractional reserve banking.
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1873 was caused by the collapse of the Greenback, which was printed willy-nilly by the Lincoln admin.
I don’t get these idiots. Mr Woods has a PhD in history, do they really think that he’d make such a big and obvious mistake in his book (that nobody would point out no less). This is just another ad hoc argument against an Austrian.
The commenter seems to be conflating the practice of “centralized government banking” with the existence of a distinct central bank. When a government intervenes in the banking industry (by suspending specie payments, setting up national banks, creating fiat money, etc) then it is, as such, centrally banking. It’s a confusing choice of words by Woods (if those were indeed his words) but the point is that boom-bust cycles are indeed caused by government meddling in banking and with currency.