Hayek contra o "free banking"

Hayek and Free Banking, por George Selgin:

I owe a heckuva lot to Friedrich Hayek.  Had it not been for him, I might never have heard of "free banking," (...)

It was two pamphlets that Hayek published in the 1970s — first, Choice in Currency (1976) and then Denationalisation of Money  (1978) — that caused the scales to fall off of my eyes and of those of  some other economists, thereby encouraging us to reconsider the merits of  private and competitive currency systems.  That reconsideration in turn led to a revival of interest in former free banking episodes, including those of Scotland and Canada, which monetary economists had previously neglected or overlooked. (...)

Yet Hayek himself was no free banker.  For starters, his own vision of "choice in currency" had little if anything in common with historical free banking arrangements.  In those arrangements, banks dealt in established, precious-metal monetary units,  like the British pound and the American dollar, receiving deposits of metallic money, or claims to such, and offering in place their own readily-redeemable liabilities, including circulating banknotes.  In Hayek's scheme, in contrast, competing firms issue irredeemable paper notes, with each brand representing a distinct monetary unit.  Far from resembling ordinary commercial banks, Hayek's "banks" resemble so many modern central banks in that they issue a sort of "fiat" money.  But they differ from actual central banks in enjoying neither monopoly privileges nor the power to compel anyone to accept their products. (...)

But Hayek didn't merely differ from free bankers in proposing a form of currency competition distinct from free banking.  He expressly opposed  free banking.  Asked, during a 1945 radio interview, whether he considered the Federal Reserve System a step along "the road to serfdom," he unhesitatingly replied, "No.  That the monetary system must be under central control has never, to my mind, been denied by any sensible person."And although by the 1970s he had come to believe it both possible and desirable to have a currency stock consisting of the irredeemable paper of numerous private firms, he also continued to maintain that, so long as government authorities supplied a nation's standard money, private firms should not be able to issue circulating paper claims denominated and redeemable in that money.

A oposição de Hayek ao "free banking" (isto é, a haver notas do Banco Português de Investimento e do Novo Banco a dizerem ambas "50 euros", podendo ser ambas trocadas aos balcões do banco respetivo por euros emitidos pelo BCE) será uma peculiaridade dele? Ou será simplesmente uma variante da oposição dos austríacos à reserva bancária fraccional? Ainda sobre este assunto, Why Didn't Hayek Favor Laissez Faire in Banking?[PDF], por Lawrence White.



http://www.alt-m.org/2015/07/18/hayek-and-free-banking/