An impulse speech by Prof. Richard Werner opened yesterday's Socratic Debate at the Hayek Institute in Vienna 🇦🇹.
The “interest rates drive growth” theory is empirically wrong, he showed; rates follow growth, an 'Austrians' agree. Bank credit creation and its allocation decide whether economies boom or bust.
Prof. Werner warned that central banks, regulator-driven centralisation, and CBDCs will wipe out Europe’s local SME-lending banks (thousands already gone). The real path to prosperity is many small regional banks directing credit into productive investment, not speculation.
Our main point for debate was that Prof. Werner thinks that this can be fixed with the right policy prescription for central banks, whereas I think that the very institution of central banks and their enormous illegitime power will invariably lead to negative economic and political outcomes in time. Central banking and CBDCs are incompatible with free markets and a free society.
#Bitcoin shows that money (SoV) creation is a matter for the free market, and #Bitcredit aims to show the same for currency (MoE) creation.
Read on.
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