Synopsis
Money and Credit - Volume I Austrian economist Prof. Antal Fekete has published his Opus Magnum in 4 volumes or about 900 pages. This first volume in full colour printing, reads the easiest (about the level of Bachelor) but the contents contain the foundations for the three other volumes. His out-of-print earlier works such as the prize-winning essay Whither Gold? has been added as well as the Pillars of Sound Money and Credit told in the form of a tale. His style is erudite - yet clear and concise.
Written and presented for people with some university background, but also for younger students and other enterested people, its tone and language is universally understandable. It requires no background in mathematics, jargon nor equations. Bestselling heterodox austrian economist Antal Fekete draws on the background of the austrian economic tradition, yet knowledge of it is no pre-requisite either. But Fekete, being a math professor, denies economics is a field of purely mathematical science. He maintains it always has been and will be a human science. At the end of this volume has been added a small section on 'fractional banking'. Here you encounter some light mathematics and it will not burden the non-mathematicians. On the occasion of this reprint, many endnotes have been added, as well as a bibliography and index. You also may enjoy the tongue-in-cheek glossary.
This is Volume I of a never published Treatise on Gold, Interest and Discount and the hitherto undiscovered links between them, necessary for the distributed decision making on interest rates or discount rates. A penetrating study of the inner working of the gold standard. Additionally, it shines some light on social cooperation in a free market that makes for distributed economic wisdom.
With an unsurpassed erudition on money, banking and international trade, this is one of the first heterodox books outside of mainstream theory for anyone who wishes to understand how a proper economy functions. After reading this volume, the reader will understand the cause of financial crises and unemployment. We need better theory or the practise such as it was before the crises: that is, under a circulating gold coin standard, compared to our present monetary arrangements.
Accessible academic work with bibliography, notes and illustrations in 4 volumes, based on the seminal work of the founder of the Austrian School of Economics Prof. Carl Menger and his important later disciples like Ludwig von Mises and F. Hayek yet without phenomenology or dogmatic liberalism ideology.
About the Author
Antal E. Fekete, Professor, Memorial University of Newfoundland, was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1932. He graduated from the Loránt Eötvös University of Budapest in mathematics in 1955. He left Hungary in the wake of the 1956 anti-Communist uprising that was brutally put down by the occupying Soviet troops. He immigrated to Canada in the following year and was appointed Assistant Professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1958. In 1993, after 35 years' of service he retired with the rank of Full Professor. During this period he also had tours of duty as visiting professor at Columbia University in the City of New York (1961), Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland (1964), Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia (1970), Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey (1974). Since 2005 he has been Professor at Large of Intermountain Institute for Science and Applied Mathematics (IISAM), Missoula, Montana. Professor Fekete is an autodidactic expert on monetary economics. During his associations with various universities and institutions he has done research and lectured on economics. On one such occasion, in 1974, he gave a talk on gold in the seminar of Paul Volcker, then Senior Fellow at Princeton University, soon to be named as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and, later, as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. In 1984 Professor Fekete was invited by the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to spend a year there as Visiting Fellow. He served as Editor of the Monograph Series of the Committee for Monetary Research and Education, then headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, while contributing several monographs to the Series, reproduced on his website. He also acted as Senior Editor for the American Economic Foundation in Cleveland, Ohio, and produced the popular pamphlet series Ten Pillars of Sound Money, also reproduced in Volume I of this series. When in 1984 South Africa celebrated the 100th anniversary of discovering gold in the Witwatersrand, at the conference Gold 100 commemorating that event in Johannesburg, Professor Fekete delivered the keynote address entitled Gold in the International Monetary System, also reproduced on his website. In 1985 Congressman William E. Dannemeyer of Fullerton, California, invited Professor Fekete to join his staff in Washington, D.C., to work on fiscal and monetary reform. While on this assignment, lasting for five years, he gave numerous lectures on Capitol Hill as well as in California. Ultimately the proposals hammered out in Congressional offices under his chairmanship were taken to the White House by a delegation of ten Republican Congressmen led by Congressman Dannemeyer. According to these proposals the runaway government deficit could be reined in by refinancing the entire U.S. government debt through issuing gold bonds. The historic meeting took place in the Oval Office in October, 1989, and was duly reported by The New York Times. Having listened attentively to the presentation of Mr. Dannemeyer, President George Bush, Sr., instructed his Treasury Secretary, also present at the meeting, to let the Congressional and Treasury staff meet and put forward a joint proposal. This initiative came to nought as the Treasury deliberately derailed negotiations through procrastination.
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