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Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles - The Ludwig von Mises ...

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160 <strong>Money</strong>, <strong>Bank</strong> <strong>Credit</strong>, <strong>and</strong> <strong>Economic</strong> <strong>Cycles</strong>by a few clear, simple rules included in the Civil, Commercial<strong>and</strong> Penal Codes. <strong>The</strong> main purpose of these rules would be toguarantee adherence to the strict safekeeping principle (100-percent reserve requirement) regarding not only monetarydem<strong>and</strong>-deposit contracts, but also any other economic-financialtransaction in which the chief goal of the participants is toobtain custody <strong>and</strong> safekeeping for their deposits. In this (fornow) hypothetical situation, the analysis we are proposingwould greatly assist judges <strong>and</strong> jurists in making sense of therich, extremely complex variety of contracts <strong>and</strong> transactionsconstantly emerging in the economic-financial world <strong>and</strong>would allow them to determine when to classify these transactionsas null <strong>and</strong> void <strong>and</strong>/or criminal according to generalcivil <strong>and</strong> penal provisions. 44At any rate, we should avoid a selfishly defeatist attitudecommon in the financial sector. It is based on the belief thathuman ingenuity will be capable of finding ever more sophisticatedmeans of fraudulently evading universal legal principles<strong>and</strong> that therefore in practice they will never be obeyed <strong>and</strong>defended. We should avoid this defeatist posture, because theproliferation of ingenious ways to violate these principles stemsprecisely from the fact that public authorities have alwaysdefined <strong>and</strong> defended them in an extremely confusing, ambiguous<strong>and</strong> contradictory manner, <strong>and</strong> as a result there is no generalawareness of the importance of respecting them. Quite theopposite is true. <strong>The</strong> prevailing values <strong>and</strong> ideas have over timebecome so corrupted that now people consider the irregulardeposit contract with a fractional reserve to be legitimate. Ifgeneral legal principles were again understood <strong>and</strong> respected,the number of irregular behaviors would decrease significantly(especially if public authorities really took care to preserve <strong>and</strong>defend the corresponding property rights). At the same time,the proven fact that human ingenuity continually searches for44 In the model we propose (<strong>and</strong> which we will consider in greater detailin the last chapter), the control exerted in the financial sphere by the centralbank <strong>and</strong> its officials would be replaced by that of judges, whowould recover their full authority <strong>and</strong> central role in the application ofgeneral legal principles in the financial area as well.

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