Economic Recessions, Banking Reform and the Future of Capitalism

Jesús Huerta de Soto delivers the Hayek Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics:

I would like to start off by stressing the following important idea: all the financial and economic problems we are struggling with today are the result, in one way or another, of something that happened precisely in this country on July 19, 1844… What happened on that fateful day that has conditioned up to the present time the financial and economic evolution of the whole world? On that date, Peel’s Bank Act was enacted after years of debate between Banking and Currency School Theorists on the true causes of the artificial economic booms and the subsequent financial crises that had been affecting England especially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

The Bank Charter Act of 1844 successfully incorporated the sound monetary theoretical insights of the Currency School. This school was able to correctly discern that the origin of the boom and bust cycles lay in the artificial credit expansions orchestrated by private banks and financed not by the prior or genuine savings of citizens, but through the issue of huge doses of fiduciary media (in those days mainly paper banknotes, or certificates of demand deposits issued by banks for a much greater amount than the gold originally deposited in their vaults). So, the requirement by Peel’s Bank Act of a 100 percent reserve on the banknotes issued was not only in full accordance with the most elementary general principles of Roman Law regarding the need to prevent the forgery or the over-issue of deposit certificates, but also was a first and positive step in the right direction to avoid endlessly recurring cycles of booms and depressions.

However Peel’s bank Act, not withstanding the good intentions behind it, and its sound theoretical foundations, was a huge failure. Why? Because it stopped short of extending the 100 percent reserve requirement to demand deposits also (Mises 1980, 446-448).

More here.