Daniel Samosir

Ludwig von Mises published The Theory of Money and Credit in 1912, fourteen years before the Federal Reserve's inflationary credit expansion helped ignite the Depression of the 1930s. The timing was impecable. Mises had already explained, in precise technical detail, exactly how that disaster would unfold. His core insight is simple. Money is the most marketable commodity, the good that everyone accepts in exchange because everyone expects everyone else to accept it. Money is not wealth. When governments or central banks expand the money supply without a corresponding increase in real goods, they redistribute purchasing power from your savings to whoever spends the new money first, typically banks and government contractors. They don't create prosperity. Mises also worked out the business cycle mechanically. Artificially low interest rates send false signals. Entrepreneurs borrow and invest in long-term capital projects that consumer demand cannot actually sustain. The boom feels real. Then the credit stops expanding and the whole structure collapses, because the underlying demand was never there. You lived the 2008 version of this. You're watching the 2020s version unfold in real estate and sovereign debt right now. Mises grounded monetary theory in human action, in individual choices made under uncertainty, not in aggregate statistics. GDP figures and CPI measurements obscure the actual damage inflation does to specific people making specific decisions. A retiree in Phoenix holding dollar-denominated bonds in September 2026 isn't experiencing "2.8% inflation." She's watching her purchasing power get quietly confiscated while the Fed congratulates itself on stability. Mises gave you the tools to see through that performance. Most economists still pretend Mises never existed.