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The Cobden Centre has been established to promote social progress through honest money, free trade and peace. We endorse Richard Cobden's view that:
Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less.

Recent articles

Losing the loser’s game

25 May 13 by Tim Price

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
- Ernest Hemingway.

“Recovery in sight, says departing Bank of England governor Mervyn King..”
- The Daily Telegraph.

In one of the most [...]


Introducing The Journal of Prices & Markets

22 May 13 by David Howden

Ludwig von Mises once wrote that all of economics can be neatly summed up in one of two studies: either you are studying how prices come into being, or you are studying how markets allocate goods. All economic problems can be distilled into one of these two categories.

Prices and markets are innocuous concepts – they [...]


Regulating banks the Austrian way

21 May 13 by David Howden

Most people — from young to old and from all ends of the political spectrum — are united by a common bond. The idea that banks are deserving of taxpayer support is viewed as morally repugnant to them. Business owners see bank bailouts as an unfair advantage that is not extended to all businesses. Those [...]


Bank balances and gold

20 May 13 by Alasdair Macleod

There has been a growing shift in favour of assets relative to bank deposits. This was initially encouraged by zero interest rates, but more recently there is little doubt that Cyprus’s bail-in has accelerated the trend. This explains the bull markets in bonds and equities, which conveniently underwrites the entire banking system. It is however [...]


Gold is money not because it is scarce but because it is abundant

17 May 13 by Krzysztof Nedzynski

The Honorable Ron Paul says:

Why is gold good money? Because it possesses all the monetary properties that the market demands: it is divisible, portable, recognizable and, most importantly, scarce – making it a stable store of value.

True. Yet those properties are not the most relevant today. The most important characteristic that makes gold a good [...]