A Treatise on Currency and Banking

A Treatise on Currency and Banking first appeared in 1840. This remarkable hard-money treatise is by Condy Raguet (1784–1842), a noted Pennsylvania politician and economist who worked as a merchant in several Latin American countries. He was wholly dedicated to free trade, the free market, and especially to sound money and banking.

In this book he documents how bank inflation causes booms and busts, and he articulates, with remarkable prescience, how those cycles in which government does nothing come and go, while those in which government tries to help last and last. His book is a great narrative to read in light of the current cycle of boom and bust.

He clearly distinguishes between sound and unsound banking practices, delineated based on their redemption practices. He shows that there is a big difference between good credit based on savings and bad credit based on monetary expansion. He clarifies the role that credit plays in the cause of economic growth: praiseworthy when extended based on good judgment, but dangerous when extended with guarantees and recklessness.

Raguet is celebrated by the American hard-money school as a great theorist and as part of a group of thinkers who warned against the national bank and other schemes to guarantee the monetary system against failure. This book makes for a wonderful read both as a text on banking and as a look back to the best of 19th-century American economic thought.