This book discusses contemporary banking and monetary policy issues from the perspective of the Austrian School of Economics. Based on the heritage of the Austrian school, leading scholars and practitioners offer a coherent diagnosis and analysis of the factors leading to Europe’s current financial crisis. The first part of the book discusses Ludwig von Mises’s and Friedrich August von Hayek’s ideas on banking and monetary policy from both historical and economic standpoints. It includes contributions on Austrian monetary dynamics and micro-foundational business cycle theory, von Mises’s concepts of liquidity and solvency of fractional-reserve banks, and liberalism of Austrian economics. The second part analyzes the measures taken by the European Central Bank (ECB) in light of the ideas of von Mises and Hayek. It includes contributions on non-neutrality of money, ECB monetary policy, and the future of the ECB. The third and final part presents discussions on monetary reforms, including contributions on Bitcoins, Cryptocurrencies and anti-deflationist Paranoia.

The financial crisis has exposed severe shortcomings in mainstream monetary economics and modern finance. It is surprising that these shortcomings have not led to a wider debate about the need to overhaul these theories. Instead, mainstream economists have closed ranks to defend existing theories and public authorities have expanded their interference in markets. This book investigates the problems associated with mainstream monetary economics and finance, and proposes alternatives based on the Austrian school of economics. This school emanated from the work of the nineteenth-century Austrian economist Carl Menger and was developed further by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich August von Hayek. In monetary economics, the Austrian school regards the creation of money by banks through credit extension as a key source of economic instability. From this follows the need for a comprehensive reform of our present monetary system. In a new monetary order, money could be issued by both public and private institutions, and there would be no need for fractional reserve banking. Instead of creating money, banks would intermediate it. In finance, the Austrian school rejects the notion of rational expectations and measurable risk. Individuals use their subjective knowledge to gather and evaluate information, and they act in a world of radical uncertainty. Hence, markets are not "efficient" nor can portfolios be built on the basis of known probability distributions of asset prices as described in the modern finance literature. This book explores the need for a new theoretical foundation for asset pricing and investment management that will give practitioners more useful orientation.

The Austrian School of Economics is an intellectual tradition in economics and political economy dating back to Carl Menger in the late-19th century. Menger stressed the subjective nature of value in the individual decision calculus. Individual choices are indeed made on the margin, but the evaluations of rank ordering of ends sought in the act of choice are subjective to individual chooser. For Menger, the economic calculus was about scarce means being deployed to pursue an individual's highest valued ends. The act of choice is guided by subjective assessments of the individual, and is open ended as the individual is constantly discovering what ends to pursue, and learning the most effective way to use the means available to satisfy those ends. This school of economic thinking spread outside of Austria to the rest of Europe and the United States in the early-20th century and continued to develop and gain followers, establishing itself as a major stream of heterodox economics. The Oxford Handbook of Austrian Economics provides an overview of this school and its theories. The various contributions discussed in this book all reflect a tension between the Austrian School's orthodox argumentative structure (rational choice and invisible hand) and its addressing of a heterodox problem situations (uncertainty, differential knowledge, ceaseless change). The Austrian economists from the founders to today seek to derive the invisible hand theorem from the rational choice postulate via institutional analysis in a persistent and consistent manner. Scholars and students working in the field of History of Economic Thought, those following heterodox approaches, and those both familiar with the Austrian School or looking to learn more will find much to learn in this comprehensive volume.

Alan S. Blinder offers the dual perspective of a leading academic macroeconomist who served a stint as Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board—one who practiced what he had long preached and then returned to academia to write about it. He tells central bankers how they might better incorporate academic knowledge and thinking into the conduct of monetary policy, and he tells scholars how they might reorient their research to be more attuned to reality and thus more useful to central bankers. Based on the 1996 Lionel Robbins Lectures, this readable book deals succinctly, in a nontechnical manner, with a wide variety of issues in monetary policy. The book also includes the author's suggested solution to an age-old problem in monetary theory: what it means for monetary policy to be "neutral."