For a real competition of currencies.

Summary How can monetary stability be guaranteed? Friedrich A. Hayek proposes a radically new answer to this question. According to him, state control of monetary issuance leads to recurrent economic crises. In 1976, Hayek defended, on the contrary, the issue of competing private currencies in parallel with national currencies. Private banks would then issue separate currencies and would be encouraged to stabilize their value, allowing for inflation over the long term that would be much lower than what we have been experiencing for several decades. The book was written shortly after the United States broke the link between the dollar and gold in 1971, giving way to the contemporary monetary system based solely on inconvertible paper currencies. For Hayek, monetary reform is urgent, because what is at stake is not a purely technical matter, but "the future of civilization": money creation by central banks undermines the proper functioning of the market and feeds the growth of the state. The future of the free society is therefore linked to the future of the monetary system.