This is Jeff Deist and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. This is the Human Action Podcast and today we're discussing the theory of money and credit, which may be the most important book about money ever written. In fact, Professor Guido Halsman thinks in some ways it represents a bigger achievement for Mises than human action. Yet Mises produced it as his first major work in his late 20s as what we would today call his PhD dissertation. Because of this book, for the first time, we understand how and why money has value as a commodity with non-monetary uses that holds its worth over time. And it was precisely this temporal element that had eluded economists up until then, including Carl Menger whom we discussed a week ago with Dr. Joe Salerno. Mises not only applies Menger's idea of marginal utility to money and creates an entirely new theory of value for money, but he also presents us with an early version of business cycle theory and the importance of interest rates in guiding or in many cases misleading entrepreneurial action. This is a staggering work. It's one that deserves more attention. It's far shorter than human action and easier read. And so Professor Jeffrey Herbner of Grove City College joins us to give this a really full length treatment and do a deep dive into some of the economic theory that Mises presents. If you like the show, if you're interested in reading the book and understanding some of the monetary theory it presents, we have an offer at Mises.org slash TMC. Again, Mises.org slash TMC for the theory of money and credit put in the code HA POD, Human Action POD, and you'll get $5 off the hardcover version of this book, bringing it from $15 down to $10, which is an absolute great bargain for the hardcover. You can also just go to Mises.org and search theory of money and credit, and you'll find our free HTML and PDF links if you'd rather just consume it at no cost online. We hope you enjoy this discussion with Dr. Jeffrey Herbner, and we hope you're enjoying the new format podcast with deeper dives into presenting actual Austrian theory rather than just generalize libertarians' topics. So stay tuned for the theory of money and credit. Dr. Jeffrey Herbner, thank you for joining us on the Human Action Podcast. Well, thanks for having me, Jeff. It's a great pleasure. Well, I know you just finished up your student conference at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. Talk a little bit about that and how did it go and what is it entail? How can people find out more about that? Well, we are in our 15th year annually for doing the Austrian Student Scholars Conference, and I think the Institute posted a pair of Bailons keynote talk on Mises.org just this morning. So from there, I think you can get to the web site that we have for the conference, and you can not only see all of the keynotes, but you can get electronic copies of the papers that the students presented. We had 22 students present papers from about half from Grove City College and about half from the colleges and universities around the country and some from foreign countries. So it's a great program, and we hope to keep it going in the future. It's a wonderful networking opportunity for our students and the like-minded students at other places. It's a good way to contact some faculty that they've maybe read their work or like Pear Bailond and Chris Coyne and so on. So yeah, it's a great event. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we're all worried about the state of higher education, especially undergraduate higher education, some of the craziness that's going on, the lack of learning and really the brainwashing of young people. So we have to find whether we, I don't know if it's applicable to call young people the remnant, but we have to find the good young people out there. We have to reach them. We have to get them motivated and interested in Austrian economics and libertarian theory, because if we don't, they are going to be supplanted or outshouted or outvoted or outnumbered by the socialist young people. So I can't stress enough, if you have young people in your lives, high school, young college age people to get them to mises.org, to get them thinking about places like Grove City for their own studies, and you have not only Dr. Herbner there, but also his colleague, Sean Rittenauer. So for see Jeff, I've got a couple of years before college with my own kids. But so as I mentioned in the introduction, we are talking about mises is great. The theory of money and credit is his first full length book. Not only is it that it's basically his PhD dissertation. It is his thesis for his habilitation degree at the University of Vienna. He's writing this book, Jeff, between about 1906 and 1911. So all this is pre-war. Just talk about how this young guy is about 31 when it's published in 1912. I mean, this is basically the first big work he's done. It's not coincidentally a work on money. And if you believe Joe Salerno, if you believe Guido Halsman, this is one of the four great Austrian economic treatises. And it's a book on theory. And it's his first book. I mean, as your professor, just set for us what an achievement this was. Yeah, it's absolutely incredible. It's not only a very densely insightful book in terms of the particulars that he goes through in developing the theory, but he addressed the most pressing issue that was left untouched by the Marge's revolution, which was how do we integrate the value of money into the system of marginal utility and give a demand and supply explanation of the value of money? I mean, this was an amazing achievement that one could expect perhaps from a genius who had been in the middle of his career and had the time to master all of the literature. Imagine what he had to read in order to write a book on money and credit. And yet, as you say, he was writing this in his late 20s and then published it in 1931. I should say also that when I taught money in banking about 10 years ago at Grove City College, I taught it for four or five years, I used the theory of money and credit as the textbook. And it's accessible to students. It's an amazing work, deeply insightful and yet lucid and clear and organized in a way that's very accessible to the students. Well, it's strange to me, Jeff, I find it a far easier read than human action. I mean, even though obviously it's translated from the original German, then there's two different translations out there, two major translations. It's not a tough sled. Right, no, that's absolutely right. And the students appreciated that. You'd see them walk in the halls with their copies of theory of money and credit or you go to the library and then they are reading theory of money and credit. And coming in my office and asking me questions, insightful questions, they're obviously grasping what he's doing and they appreciate the organized structure of it. Well, I bet they also appreciate a $12 paperback as opposed to a $120 Samuel's or whatever. But what's interesting to me is there's this great anecdote in Huerta Serto's write up of the Austrian school where he says, Mises read Manger's principles in 1903. And up until then, like Manger had mostly trained in law and law was a little bit different. Legal education was a little different back then. It had some economics involved with it. But so in 1903, he makes this decision internally to become an economist. And less than a decade later in 1912, he's got theory of money and credit. Pretty remarkable. Yeah, just absolutely incredible, especially given his testimony, of course, that when he read Manger's work in 1903, it made an economist of him because before that, he was sort of a pragmatic, soft interventionist. Right. And Manger's principles does not give us a Mangerian monetary policy or a Mangerian monetary policy per se. It talks about the origins of money. But we can't really say at that point that Manger had delivered any kind of real monetary theory for Mises to build upon. Yeah, that's right. About the only other thing was the cash balance approach to the demand for money. So I think Mises saw that in Manger's work. Now, for folks who are wondering what I say the four great treatises of Austrian economics, there's some debate over this. Doctors Halsman and Salerno, for example, are not entirely in agreement. But generally speaking, people consider Mises' theory of money and credit, Manger's principles, Mises' human action and Rothbard's man economy and state as those four. So if you just read those, you're way ahead of the game. Jeff, I want to talk to you a little bit about the context, not just the Mangerian context, but the classical context in which Mises wrote this book. He talks at some length about the banking school versus the currency school, a debate that's still somewhat with us today. So can you give us sort of a rough draft of the banking school versus the currency school and why this milieu mattered when Mises wrote this book? Right. So the currency school of which Mises considered himself a member held this view that Mises develops in the theory of money and credit that any issue of fiduciary media, as he called it, would set in motion a boom bus cycle and that the origin then of the boom bus cycle was really embedded in the monetary regime and the way in which credit could be expanded through monetary inflation. And the banking school held the view that this Mises calls the inflationist view in theory of money and credit, that it was necessary for there to be monetary inflation to sort of fund additional economic activity. And so Mises was really writing within that debate when he talked about these issues of money and banking. Right. And the banking school, this idea is still with us today that we need a flexible amount of money in the economy to allow for growth. And I think if I recall, Rothbard touches on this in his short, what has government done to our money? In other words, we don't care per say about what the money supply is in society. In other words, prices adjust. Yes, that's absolutely right. So that's the one wing of the argument, right? Is that we don't need monetary inflation to have economic progress because the structure of prices adjusts through entrepreneurial anticipations and movements in demand across all the production processes and input prices in the economy. And then Mises furthers this, right, with his theory of the business cycle to show that not only don't we need monetary inflation, the monetary inflation is actually harmful to the process of economic progress. Okay, but I want to drive home this point. So the banking school is basically telling us that any kind of system of full convertibility to metal of paper money is actually harmful to the economy. It's going to hamstring the economy. And the currency school is sort of telling us, look, any kind of banking school approach is going to allow for paper to eventually overwhelm metal. And it's going to it's there's always going to be an incentive by kings or monarchs or states or whoever to create inflation. Yeah, that's exactly right. And courses is pointed out by others. The the only drawback or blindside of the currency school is that they didn't consider bank deposits as fiduciary issue. They thought of only bank note issue as creating this credit expansion process. And so in the restrictions that they put on bank note issue like the appeal act were inadequate. And then of course, they were discredited because monetary inflation credit expansion proceeded to pace even though the banking system had or at least the English state had adopted their policy. So but why do we use the term banking school? In other words, they're they're an inflationary school, a notion that we need to be able to expand the money supply. But it also implies that we need banks, whether that's central banks or commercial banks, a lot of people in libertarian circles at least today would say money could exist privately. So I mean, is this banking mean pro bank in this sense? Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not sure of the exact historical reason for the choice of the terminology why it's banking school and currency school. But Mises addresses the underlying theoretical issues in theory of money and credit where he talks conceptually about banking and the functions of banks that are performed legitimate important functions like financial intermediation and production of money substitutes and you know a currency exchange and so on and so forth. So these functions are important to be performed in in an economy, whether they're performed by banks or not is I guess an incidental feature. But in a world of Jeffrey Herbner's monetary regime, what would banks likely exist? Would they perform a useful or I should say value adding intermediary function in the economy? I think the answer would probably be yes. Yes, indeed. Right. So the banks or some institution would be valuable for the function of financial intermediation of borrowing from small savers and then pooling the money and investigating the credit worthy investors and then making loans and so on. So they perform that function and they would undoubtedly still provide us with a checking account balances but they would just be back to 100% by money itself. Well, can I just as an aside, Jeff, when I was young, I have some memory of my great grandfather who whose wife had died and he lived with us for a period. He had been in World War One and had learned his profession of electrician through a correspondent school literally from a match book company. And I remember him telling or remember my father conveying to me that he had gotten a bank loan for his house as a youngish man coming back from World War One based, you know, think about this at the time. There's no social security number. There's no credit system of Experian or any of these rating agencies. He had gotten a loan from a bank basically based on his local reputation as a guy who had was good at his job or showed up dutifully for work or was honorable or something. I mean, just imagine how and this is not too long after Mises writes this book. So just imagine what a different world we're living in. I mean, he literally got bank credit based on his localized reputation. Yeah, that's a very interesting case. It just goes to show you the way in which the function of financial intermediation, you know, borrowing, banks borrowing from some and then intermediating the credit to others can be performed efficiently by these market institutions in different settings, you know, one that's more it's more relevant to have a local base of information and a local base of operation and then others where maybe the bank is international and has other ways of ascertaining credit worthiness and happy, you know, the appropriate interest rate spread and so on and so forth. Well, I suspect he wasn't the only guy getting alone. No, I suspect the bank wasn't losing money. Right. So, but I want to get I want to move to part one of this book, which is really about the the origins of money. And I guess I want to ask you first, does it build much on mangers earlier insights that that money arises as the most saleable or marketable commodity in the economy? Does it does it build profoundly on that? Well, it develops from from manger. So, yeah, I would say it does. Mises, of course, solved the great logical problem that had been pointed out by Helferich against applying the marginal utility theory of value to money, which was, of course, what we call today the regression theorem of Mises. So, that is all really an outgrowth of mangers, a story about the origin of money. So, how it proceeds from a barter setting then step by step into into the generally saleable good and then into money. What about this idea that money is neither a production or consumption good? Is that novel at the time? I wouldn't say it's entirely novel. In my understanding, I think there were perhaps other economists who would have held this view. But I think it's certainly a minority position. And of course, what Mises is trying to show with this is that all of the important functions of money stem from its use as a general medium of exchange. So, the fact that it's a unit of count stems from its use as a general medium of exchange. And the use of money as a store of value is only undertaken by people because money is the general medium of exchange. So, that I think that position was, I think, unique with Mises. Well, what's interesting is it foreshadows a bit this debate between Mises and Hayek over what imperfect information in the economy really means to a capitalist or to an entrepreneur. Is it about a lack of knowledge? Or is it about a lack of property rights and the ability to calculate? Those are kind of two different things. And I think unit of account really goes to that calculation. In other words, capitalists need money prices. Yeah, no, you're at, you put your finger on it exactly. So, this is, Mises is the root of Mises' argument about calculation is that only with money prices can we reduce all of the different exchange ratios in the economy that entrepreneurs need to know to a common unit. And this common unit is the monetary unit. And then with that, comparisons could be made and we get economic calculation. And without that common unit, then we could have all the information of the sort of raw exchange ratios in barter or whatever, and it would do us no good. So, when we move into the part two of the book, which is all about the value of money, how money gets value, there really is no theory of value of money at the time. I mean, there are some ideas, but Mises is being novel here. He's creating a theory of value. Yeah, see, that's exactly right. Prior to Mises' work, of course, the value of money in the objective sense, the purchasing power of money, was conceived only through the quantity theory as a kind of aggregate relationship. And what Mises accomplished, of course, was to show that that's not correct to think of it this way, any more than it would be correct to think of the price of bread this way, or that there's aggregate demand for bread and the stock of bread and so on. But you have to build the theory from individual demands, individual marginal utilities. And so this was the big achievement on the value of money question. What is the quantity theory of money? Explain that for us. Well, the quantity theory of money is just based on the quantity equation, which is an accounting identity that says the money that's spent to buy goods is equal to the monetary value of the goods. And then this equation is disaggregated into components. So the money spent is disaggregated into the money stock and the so-called velocity of money. The number of times each monetary unit is spent on average over some period. And then the monetary value of the goods is split into the prices of the goods and then the quantities of the goods bought and sold. And so then from that point, depending on what you assume about the relationship between these four aggregate variables, you can get a definite relationship between prices in general and the money stock. So the classic case would be say in the short run, if you assume the velocity and the quantity of goods is fixed, then any increase in the money stock on the left side of the equation would be balanced by an equivalent increase in the price array on the right side of the equation. But of course, Mises brings up Kentillon. We see that new money is never evenly distributed. We all don't get an extra zero on our bank accounts. It flows through the economy unevenly and some people get rich. And this is exactly why he or it was the implication of his stress on the cash balance approach to money. This was the bridge that he used between the individual valuation of money and the demand for it that we can then aggregate the individual demand for it in cash balances. And this then allowed him to see how Kentillon effects are integrated into a value theory. Well, okay, help me with this. I bet like a lot of our listeners, I don't really get. I'm suspicious of this idea of velocity of money. It sounds like this Keynesian stimulus project, where if we're all out there moving money that somehow that motion equals action and we're getting wealthier. I mean, I'm reading this wrong. No, no, you're reading it exactly right. The whole terminology is disorienting and inappropriate. We don't talk this way about any other good. We don't talk about the velocity of automobiles or the velocity of men's dress shoes and so on as a way to explain the price of automobiles or the price of dress shoes. So Mises is saying, why do we do this? Why take this ad hoc-ish approach to money? Why can't we just think about money and its purchasing power in the same way that we think about the price of any other good? It's just determined by demand and supply. And the demand is determined by the value, the marginal utility that we place on the unit of the good, whether it's a new pair of shoes or a new sum of money. But all this goes back to what is money. It seems like the other schools have this mystical view of it. It's almost a historical and philosophical question as much as it is economics. What exactly is money? If you don't accept Mises's and Manger's notion of money as a commodity, all kinds of divisions are bound to happen, it seems to me. You're absolutely right. And Mises takes a lot of time and very money and credit to talk about these alternative views of money, like money as a claim and so on. And of course what Mises is insisting upon and Manger before Mises is that money is a good. And if it's an economic good, it's a scarce good, then it will conform to all the laws of human action that all other goods will in the market economy. And of course claims are not goods, two different things. Before we really get into this regression theorem and the circularity question, let's touch real quick on this use value versus exchange value. Manger got into it quite a bit. So the difference in a regular good, let's say a regular commodity and a money commodity, is that almost by Misesian definition anyway, there is no use value to money. Although they're both subjective that the second doesn't apply to money. It's not like a bushel of wheat you might eat. Right. Well, I would say it this way. There is no use value of money separate from its exchange value. Okay. Yeah, that I think is the way that Mises would state. So no subjective use value. There's no root subjective use value of money. In order to establish in our minds a use value for money, how we're going to subjectively rank it against goods, we have to already know it's purchasing power. Okay. So we take this Mangerian earthquake idea of marginal utility of good as a value theory for goods. But he doesn't take the next step and apply it to money. Mises does. So he creates, I guess, what we now call an Austrian theory of the value of money. Sort of give us his process or his mindset. Well, and before going through that step by step, let me just say this too. When Mises did this, he didn't just apply the marginal utility theory of value to money. He gave the final and necessary piece to explain how the marginal utility theory of value can be applied to any good in a market economy. Because if you can't have a marginal utility theory of money, then you can't conceive of how it's going to be ranked in an ordinal rank against goods. And therefore, you don't have a marginal utility theory of goods prices either. So this is what's meant by the integration that Mises achieved in applying the marginal utility theory to money. Now to go back to the regression theorem point. So the way in which it was left, this issue was left before Mises took it up, was that the marginal, if you want to think about the marginal utility of money, then you have this circularity problem. You can't even envision what the marginal utility of money could be until you already know the objective exchange value of money. And I think Visa actually made some, took some stabs at this problem by, and he was the one who first introduced the notion that there's really a time element to or a chronology to how a person would think about the subjective value of money and the purchasing power of money. We only need to know the purchasing power of money in the recent past in order to establish a subjective value for it now. And so the problem really isn't circularity along this line. The problem is we seem to be involved in an infinite regress. If we just keep regressing back in time, this sequence of marginal utility today relies on purchasing power yesterday which relied upon the marginal utility the day before and so on and so forth. We don't seem to have any stopping point. And this is where Mises built on Menger's theory of the origin of money where Mises said, yes, we do have a stopping point. The stopping point of this regress is the last day in which the commodity that became money was used just in barter. Because on that day, its subjective value, it can be determined independent from its purchasing power. Okay, so the circularity question, if we don't have a time element to this, we say, I've always struggled with the definition of this because I guess here's my thinking is, well, why do people value money because you can use it to buy stuff that you really want? Why do people accept it in exchange for stuff? Well, because it has value. So is that what it is? In other words, it has value because people assign it value and that seems circular. Is that what we mean? No, I don't think that's quite it, or at least that's not the way I would put it. I think it's just in, you can see it in comparison to another good. So if we say, how does a person establish in his mind the subjective value of an apple? We can see right away that that subjective value can be established in a person's mind independent from knowing the price of the apple. I don't need to know it at all. I can establish this just by the use value of the apple. Okay, but if money is, has use value only as the medium of exchange, then I can only establish a subjective value for it by knowing what it trades for in the market, that that's a necessary piece of information that I have to have in order to establish a subjective use value for money. And so if we go back in time, a day, a week, 10 years, and we can see that what we're using as a money commodity has value. The idea, part of the idea is that gives us greater comfort that if we accept it for stuff, that it'll have some value in the future. Right. Although Mises points out that, that money is the only good for which it's necessary for people to have some historical knowledge of, of its past exchange value. We don't need to, for this, this doesn't need to be true for other goods. But as you suggested, it needs to be true for money. Right. And some goods are brand new. Exactly. There is no past, they're a brand new product or something. But you know, here's, I think here's what critics would say, Jeff, they would say, well, okay, but a hundred years, for example, is an awful long time. And the US Fed has been producing, along with the Treasury has been producing US dollars since then. And, okay, there was Bretton Woods. And then there was Nixon's closing of the gold window convertibility in 71, yada, yada. And, you know, that's plenty far enough.  I mean, this is, this is what I imagine as the counter. Right. Well, I guess there is some point to that, because what Mises is really pointing out in this argument is simply a question of pure logic. He's just trying to show that the argument that's been advanced about the purchasing power of money and the marginal utility of money is not subject to a logical fallacy. And he's not really interested in the historical question of how one could, could in fact trace back money. You know, if you wanted to, you could actually go back historically step by step. He's interested just in the abstract question of whether or not this argument that he's advanced about the marginal utility of money is subject to a logical fallacy. Is it subject to the logical fallacy of begging the question? Is it circular reasoning? And if not, is it then subject to the logical fallacy of infinite regress? And that's where the regression theorem comes in. So Mises is not trying to do some sort of historical analysis here. It's a purely logical question, a question of logic itself. Yeah. And of course, he's writing this against a background. Well, later he's going to work in various government functions in finance, public finance functions for the Viennese government. He's going to be a professor. He's going to be a lot of things, but he's also someone you can tell from this book is really grounded in monetary history. I mean, he talks about metals and bimetalism and all kinds of historical elements here that make us, you know, I think it helps sort of alter the perception of maybe some Austrian critics that this is some theoretical brainiac guy who's totally divorced from the real world where, in fact, he's anything but he works for the Viennese government. He's a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army. He's all kinds of things. Yeah. Again, it's truly amazing when you read and absorb the work, how much he's read and retains and integrates. You know, another example of this is he points out the very first author who advanced the quantity theory, Davenzade or something like this back in the Middle Ages. They're probably not one in a thousand economists who even know that. Yeah, but this is true today, isn't it? The young PhDs in their 20s, early 30s don't really know. It's like they were dropped on an island. Yeah, that's right. Very unfortunate, but it's true. I mean, how do we deal with that? Do PhD programs not require history of economic thought? Yeah, they do not. That was driven out of professional economic training decades ago. Wow, that's interesting to me. People are interested. Bob Eklund, who is now retired from Auburn, and he's co-author of An Unbelievable. I almost call it a desktop reference on the history of economic thought because I keep it in my office. Now, it's an expensive textbook.  I don't know if you know this, Jeff. I'm actually happy that the newest person, the newest tenured full hire at the Auburn econ department is actually a young man. He's either from Iowa or Iowa State, who this is his area of specialization, the history of economic thought. I don't know what he thinks about the Austrians, but at least he has heard of them. He knows who they are. That's exactly right. Yeah, Eklund and Abraer's text is just wonderful, and you're absolutely right. If a newly minted PhD economist knows anything about history of economic thought, he's just a specialist in the history of economic thought. It's not like this is widely disseminated knowledge that you have to have in order to be a professional economist. But what kind of world are we in? If somebody listening to this podcast learns more about this than someone with a PhD in economics, it's upside down. Yeah, we're in the world that Joe Salerno likes to criticize. We're out of the world of vocational economics, and we're in this world of professional specialization where economists are mainly just advisors to government policy. Yeah. Well, so we struggle with this concept of value, and we come up with this, or he comes up, I should say, comes up with this breakthrough in helping us understand the value of money. And as you point out, that goes to the marginal ranking of everything, of all goods. Part three of the book is basically about money and banking. So he starts to integrate things like interest. He starts talking, giving us hints of a necessity and monetary policy. He gives us hints of a framework for business cycle theory. First and foremost, we were talking about this offline. I'm struck by his repeated use of the term fiduciary media. So first, tell us what that is. And as I said, I don't think that term was necessarily in widespread use in 1912. Right. So what Mises does here is provide a topology of what he calls money in the broad sense, the general medium of exchange. And he then categorizes, subcategorizes that into money proper, which then can take different forms, and then money substitutes, which are claims to money. And then the money substitutes, he subdivides into money certificates, which are claims that have been issued for which the issuing bank has 100% reserve of money for redemption. And then fiduciary media, which are claims, money substitutes for which the bank or issuing institution has only a fraction of reserve in money for redemption. And as he points out that this distinction is important because only the issue of fiduciary media permits the banks as a system to increase the money supply and expand credit. And as he points out, governments can issue fiduciary media too. Yes. Yes, that's exactly right. And in his day and age, that was happening as well, since Treasury Department, for example, would issue redeemable notes for gold and silver, gold and silver certificates. Well, so the rise of fiduciary media is he doesn't talk too much about full, what we would call full reserve banking or warehouse banking. I mean, so I guess the question in commercial banking, not government, what fiduciary media versus what? What's the alternative? Well, he was aware of this from the currency school debate. So the alternative was in fact a complete restriction of fiduciary issue. And we mentioned this before that the currency school, their big mistake according to Mises was they didn't grasp that bank deposits were money substitutes in the same way that written out banknotes were. And so while the currency school did say, look, we want a policy that limits the issue of additional banknotes, which would be consistent with Mises' policy, they didn't extend this to bank deposits. And so what Mises is saying, he's sort of filling in this gap and saying, no, no, it's any sort of form of the fiduciary issue that will generate monetary inflation and credit expansion. And so the best policy is to stop that additional issue. So theoretically, and this is a big debate, again, it foreshadows a debate amongst Austrians between full reserve and free banking schools. I mean, is this really a model for banks where they keep 100% of your money and you basically pay them for the security of it? And they issue kind of a warehouse receipt that's like a claim check at the opera for your code or something, and you go get your money and it's sitting there? I mean, is this a business model that's viable? Well, yes indeed. So this is what Mises writes about, of course. He says that, and I think Joe Salerno takes his position, this is my position as well, that you don't need to have a 100% reserve regulation or law. You simply have to have actual competition among banks that is not a system where they share reserves or policy in a cartilized arrangement, but each bank is independent and possesses its own money reserve into which its demand deposits are redeemable. And then just the competitive pressure among banks will limit their fiduciary issue and will achieve basically something close to 100% reserves. The fiduciary issue that would be forthcoming in a system like that would have minor effects. Now, when you say cartilized, what would be unacceptable or unacceptable? Like the Federal Reserve system, okay, unacceptable presumably in a Misesian monetary view. But what if a bunch of banks simply got together and privately sort of created their own insurance against a bank run and shared the premiums and spread the risk, and it's almost created a private FDIC. I mean, can we envision things like that? Yeah, well, we can not only envision it, we can look in history and see the clearinghouse systems that did this kind of thing, the suffix system back earlier in the 19th century. And of course, what happened is they all broke down from the moral hazard that's involved in trying to privately arrange cartil agreements. They're all subject to the same kind of problem that cheaters can benefit at the expense of those who continue to follow the cartel restrictions. And it was no different with private arrangements to cartilize and then share a pooled reserve. Now, what about there are free banking advocates around, like Larry White and George Seljanicato, who are certainly familiar with Austrian literature. Just in Jeff Herbner's banking system, are they allowed to have, let's say, low reserve riskier banks that actually pay interest against the really safe 100% reserve bank that maybe the little old lady goes to for security? I mean, are we allowed to have this kind of cowboy wheeling and dealing? And I don't want to get into the whole question of fraud and full reserve, but I mean, is that something that you would envision? Banks would be, yeah, my take on this is that, yes, banks would be legally free to try this out. They'd be legally free to try out any sort of voluntary financial innovation that they wanted to try out with their customers. And then we'd just let competition take its course. And so sure, they could try this out. But that's not really what's happened, though, is it in the 20th century? Oh, no. A fiduciary media has exploded and for unholy reasons starting with the Fed. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, here, we would agree with those on the free banking, the so-called free banking side. But here's the thing, it's fiduciary media today versus in Mises' time, I think we have to expand this. I mean, if we look at broader ideas or concepts of the broadest money supply, how much money is really out there sloshing around? You know, we've got base money, but now we've got M3 and even M4. I mean, there are things today we might almost hybrid instruments we might look at and say, gosh, that's basically a money substitute. Some people are even saying that about like Goldman Sachs bonds. In other words, it seems like we're on a slippery slope to creating so many money substitutes that we have a world awash in everything except all kinds of money and credit, but not enough of the real kind. Yeah, and here again, in thinking about that issue, Mises is our guide, right? And he very definitively defines what a money substitute is. It's a redemption claim for money that's perfectly secure and executable on demand for money. And so that focuses our attention on exactly what constitutes a money substitute. And then we can identify who's issuing actual claims like this. And we could discover then adding up what all of these money substitutes actually are in the economy. All of these other liquid assets then are in a sense pyramidable on top of this base money. And so the problem of the extension of these other liquid assets is partially at least a problem of the expansion of fiduciary media at the bottom of the base of this expansion. And so removing that and removing all implicit bailout guarantees and so on and so forth that generate the kind of moral hazard that's shot through our system. Then all of these highly liquid forms would also have to be radically reduced. But look at the stuff that's out there. I mean, we saw derivatives were a lot of derivative instruments were indeed bailed out in the 2008 crash because the Fed bought them from in bundles from commercial banks. I mean, we have money market funds. We have mutual funds. We have all kinds of bonds. It seems to me that there's an awful lot of stuff out there that investors minds or savers minds is almost money. Well, I think you're right. I think the increasing liquidity, the kind of artificial liquidity that can be created by fractional holdings can be extended way beyond money substitutes. And this is what has been done in our day and age. Well, let's talk about interest, about this, what it is and its function. And Joe Salerno and I talked about in Manger's principles, Frank Knight had a not too friendly snipe at Mises in the introduction to that. And he said, well, you know, Manger doesn't go quite so far as to have introduced this complete time theory of money, excuse me, time theory of interest. And so help us understand how does Mises see interest? What's its function? And how do we understand it in the economy? Right. Well, we only get the beginning of his interest rate theory really in this book, Theory Money and Credit. But his mature work, he adopts mainly from Frank Federer, who was a pure time preference theory theorist on interest, who argued that it's just embedded in the human condition that a present satisfaction is always preferred to the same satisfaction in the future. So sooner satisfaction always preferred to later satisfaction. So then the argument is that when money is exchanged intertemporally, present money will always command a premium based on this time preference element over future money. So there will always be a positive payment of interest made by the borrower paying back to the lender. So we always, for instance, we'd rather have our dream house at 40 than 90. Right. Because time has uncertainties, we could die, all kinds of things could happen. So we always prefer consumption or at least the satisfaction from having the money to potentially consume. We always prefer it sooner. Right. Okay. So I think Bombarever called it value spread. That's right. Yeah, there's been a long development of this theory and sort of the purging of fallacies. And Boombabrik, of course, was instrumental in the purging of all sorts of fallacies based on productivity as the source of interest. But he himself didn't go all the way to a pure time preference theory like Federer did, which is what Mises adopts. And so there's been this kind of gradual progress toward the Mises' final position. And Boombabrik was an important step in that. But what's, I think what's important here, one thing that's important is that Mises says interest is not part of production. It's something that lies outside of that because the marks and angles, the communists say, well, all value is created by labor. So if anyone's getting paid interest, that's just stolen from labor. And then I think even Sey, Jean-Baptiste Sey says, well, it's kind of income from capital. But I think what Mises is talking about is something very different here that this is separate from the productive process. Yes, that's absolutely right. People integrate time preference into their decisions to invest in production. But interest is not emanate out of production. It's just like all prices, it's a manifestation of our preferences for things. So is interest outside of the structure of production? The formation of interest is outside of the structure of production. But the structure of production then comes into existence in conformity with that rate of interest that or at least the fundamental rate of time preference that people have concerning trading off a present for future satisfaction. But here's what strikes me as if time plays such an important element in understanding the regression theorem and the value of money. It plays such an important element in understanding interest and banking. It seems like even today people just gloss over it, that they still don't see an intertemporal element to any of this. If you read, I don't know, Krugman or something, that all of this stuff is just sort of a, interest is just a policy tool. And none of this has anything to do with time or any things on the margin. I never hear anyone talk about time. No, you're absolutely right. Economists generally in the neoclassical mainstream think of just equilibrium. And so they think of the economy or even parts of the economy in a timeless way. And they certainly don't have an intertemporal capital structure like the Austrians do. So this is a big gap in the sort of conventional economists thinking about the economy. And you're also right that to the extent that they think about this issue of interest at all, it's just the, they would say maybe the price of money or the price of loanable funds in this market over here and that it can be manipulated by policy lowered by the Fed targeting or whatever. And this would stimulate aggregate demand and so on and so forth. So they think of interest only as a channel by which aggregate demand can be affected by policy, as you say. And so Mises sees the issuance of fiduciary media as something that suppresses or affects interest rates. Walk us through his nascent, I guess, version of Austrian business cycle theory that we get from this book. Right. So Mises says that if banks were not issuing fiduciary media, then they would just be intermediating credit. So they would have to borrow these funds from savers and pay them an interest rate and then perform their middleman function and lend the money to investors at the, so to speak, retail interest rate, paying the savers, the wholesale interest rate. So they get the interest rate spread for financial intermediation. And then the whole resource allocation that goes into producing capital goods along the production structure is constrained by this pool of saving that has been, well, the banks are intermediating part of it. And then some of it would be self-financed by entrepreneurs and so on. But it's limited to what savers wish to provide voluntarily given the payment of interest. So what fiduciary media issue allows is for banks to, by just creating fiduciary media claims out of thin air, just writing loans into people's bank accounts that can extend credit. And of course, if you increase the supply of any good, the market will only clear at a lower price. So you increase supply of credit, then interest rates must go down on these extended credit loans. And then through arbitration, the interest rate will lower on other, these funds can be channeled into other loan areas and then into the general production processes in the economy. So at low interest rates, the funds will be borrowed by entrepreneurs and they'll use these funds to buy new facilities or to use it as working capital to buy resources. And so production starts to be expanded in a way that's inconsistent with people's time preferences. Okay. And give us an example of that. In other words, all of a sudden, you've heard the saying lots of things look good on paper when interest rates are low. And I think this is true of all kinds of bubbles. Right. It's true of all the bubbles. So just take the housing bubble. So here, mortgage interest rates are suppressed and consumers then take out bigger mortgages by bigger houses. This stimulates profitability for construction of the houses. Then the entrepreneurs who are in the construction business see both more income from their production and low interest rates for expansion. And so they buy more equipment. And then the same phenomena occurs for the equipment producers. And so on and so forth, all the way back to the extraction of raw materials. So the iron mining companies find the same improvement in their financial condition and the same cheap credit that permits them to also finance an expansion in their own capital capacity and then, of course, investing more in working capital and so on. And so this whole process then proceeds along these lines. And the basic unsustainability of it all is realized through the artificial lengthening out of all of these production processes. That becomes inconsistent with the real resources that people actually desire to have allocated across the production of consumer goods and then they're saving and investing across all of the production of capital goods. So let's take your example of a construction company.  The notion of malinvestment comes in when all of a sudden demand for their housing in a region drops. We have a housing bust and all these guys and equipment because of their particular attributes or skills are not quickly and easily converted into, let's say that now the demand is for electric cars or something. In other words, there's a lot of waste. That's exactly right. And the waste is felt most with, as we say in economics, the specific assets that have been built up in these production processes. So the workers can probably find jobs at similar wages elsewhere in the economy. But the excavation equipment to be much more difficult to transfer at its boom level prices to sell into other uses. It's the capital capacity that has a high degree of specificity that loses most of its value. And then this explains, of course, why claims to those assets like stock markets and bond markets collapse. Well, I don't recall going through the book over the weekend, theory of money credit, which I've read a couple of times and I haven't read thoroughly recently. I don't recall, but I don't think Mises uses the term malinvestment in this book. No, I haven't noticed that either. I don't think he does. So this is something that comes, this is a term that comes long later to describe what happens in this length in the structure of production. Yes, that's right. Okay. Let's finish by talking about the closing part of the book, which is what he calls sound money. He's already discussed politics. He's already discussed a lot of the history of money. And I got to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, as we discussed earlier, this is not a tough read. Rothbard called it the most important book on money ever written. So we're happy to get a copy out to you. It's available for free online at Mises.org. We've got a great study guide that Bob Murphy wrote as well. So don't shy away from this book if you're not somebody who necessarily tackled or enjoyed human action, because this is a different animal. This is a younger Mises. And even with the translation from a German, I would say a punchier Mises, no offense to the great man. So when I look at this, to me, when he says sound money, he's not giving us some necessity in monetary policy. He's basically just saying metallic standard of some kind. Right. He defines sound money in this way, I think this is what he's driving at anyway. He says sound money is money that doesn't have its purchasing power influenced by politics. And this in his day and age, this meant commodity money, because the commodity has to be produced at cost and therefore it can't be just arbitrarily inflated at infant item. So this money supply business that we hear about all the time, why do we care? In other words, if the total supply of money doesn't increase or it increases slowly, why do we care? Prices adjust. Purchasing power is what we care about. Yes, that's right. The purchasing power and the relationship between prices. And as you say, the entrepreneurs in the market, this is their function to adjust input prices to output prices. So even if we had a time period for which there was mild price deflation, we would see entrepreneurs adjusting their demands as their output prices felled. Entrepreneurs would adjust their demands downward for input they use and input prices would fall and this would keep in balance the profitability of production. So when we're talking about commodities, historically the dominant commodity form of money has been gold. Mises talks about a gold standard. Give us the definition of a classical gold standard, but also give us a modern take what Jeffrey Herbner's present day gold standard might look like, gold in a modern economy. Okay, well the classical gold standard was a system in which each country who participated in the classical gold standard defined its currency in terms of weights of gold. So each currency was just by definition then redeemable for a certain amount of gold. This meant of course that each currency, say the dollar and the pound, had a fixed relationship in terms of gold claims to each other. So this was not a system of fixed exchange rates. It was a system of fixed definitions of currency in terms of gold. So the exchange rates so-called were given just by definition. And then of course in the actual trade of currencies in the market they could vary somewhat from this gold claim definition, but not very much because if they varied significantly, then there was an arbitrage profit that investors could get by selling one of the currencies and buying the other through exchanging gold. So the classical gold standard system kept a cap on the extent to which fiduciary media could be issued because it meant that as one fiduciary issue was issued more readily in one country, the reserve of gold as a ratio of the fiduciary issue would be reduced and then holders of this currency would begin to redeem and this redemption would place too much pressure on the remaining gold reserve and the countries would be forced to cut back. And so this is what you saw play out during the heyday of the gold standard, this kind of attempt on the part of governments to inflate and then a drawing back as international trade forced their hand as gold flowed out of their country. Now I think my ideal system is not this system at all but of course just a market system of production. So we'd have companies that would market their currencies, their production of money, gold coins or whatever it happened to be and then we would just let the competition sort things out. So whether we wound up on a gold standard or some mixed system would just be an entrepreneurial question that would be determined by everyone as users of the medium of exchange. Do you have any thoughts on cryptos and whether they could satisfy the market? Yeah, I think again I don't have any opinion as to whether they would win out in the competitive activity of the market but I think sure they should be tried, entrepreneurs should be able to try them out. Well I will say one thing about Bitcoin. I don't think Bitcoin would win out and it's precisely for the reason that most people advocate Bitcoin and this is that Bitcoin has an upper limit on its production. But if then that upper limit were ever reached then in a progressing economy you would have significant price deflation way more than we've ever seen historically and in fact it could get so extensive that price deflation rates could be larger than time preference interest rates in which case no lending could be done in Bitcoin and there'd have to at least be an auxiliary money used for all credit transactions. Well it's interesting talking about gold and whether it would win out in Professor Herbner's ideal system it's you know we tend to think of gold as this heavy shiny bulky thing and of and of course in part that's why paper currencies arose because they were more portable and divisible and you could have smaller denominations and they just represented gold in a bank hopefully. But you know there are people in the modern context writing about this. Steve Forbes has a book about gold James Rickards at Agora Publishing has a book called The New Gold Standard. Lewis Lehrman has written a book sort of the new case for gold I think and he wrote the in the 1980s the gold report for the Reagan commission with Dr. Ron Paul. So you know I think a lot of our listeners might say even our good libertarian and Austrian listeners might say well Professor Herbner that's great but we're not going to use gold anytime soon and this is all in the past and I'm as much as the Fed and the Treasury Department have tried to beat us over the head with fiat for a hundred years I'm not sure that that's necessarily true in your conception. Right I don't know if it's true or not it seems to be just to be an empirical question. Mises of course was in a different situation it was it was true for him that gold was the obvious alternative that the people would accept if if governments went back to sound money. It's also interesting that in his monetary proposal he advocates for the in this conversion agency that's going to print currency redeemable and gold he advocates for them to only produce really small bills and fairly large ones because Mises thought that just as an historical question if the gold standard was to be enduring people had to actually use gold coins physically because then when they were taken away they would object. Isn't that interesting people people could actually feel the difference in their hands in their pockets. On that note I'm just going to leave our audience with a couple sentences from the preface that Mises wrote to the English edition this book this was in 1934 so a couple decades after he finished it and he says I'm quoting him attempts to carry out economic reforms from the monetary side can never amount to anything but an artificial stimulation of economic activity by the expansion of the circulation and this as must constantly be emphasized must necessarily lead to crisis and depression. I mean I read that sentence to talk about oppression guy I mean you you could have read that in 2008 in front of Bernanke you could read that today in front of Jerome Powell and and it would read every bit is true. Ladies gentlemen again check out the book it's well worth your time and as I mentioned in the introduction we do have a discount you know you can get a copy of this book in hardcover actually from the Mises Institute for only $10 we also have a discount on Bob Murphy's study guide to the theory of money and credit they're both well worth your time. Drs. F. R. Herbner I haven't seen you for a while hope to see you soon but it's great to connect with you via this medium and thank you so much for your time. Well thank you Jeff and we will see each other soon at the AERC. Yeah that's right that's right in March both Dr. Herbner and our audience I hope you enjoyed the Human Action Podcast. The Human Action Podcast is available on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and on Mises.org. Subscribe to get new episodes every week and find more content like this on Mises.org.


Hello, everyone. This is the Circuit Python Weekly for November 1st, 2021. This is the time of the week where we get together to talk about all things Circuit Python. My name is Scott, and I'm sponsored by Adafruit to work on Circuit Python. Circuit Python is a version of Python designed to run on tiny computers called microcontrollers. Circuit Python development is primarily sponsored by Adafruit, so if you want to support them and Circuit Python, consider purchasing hardware from Adafruit.com. This meeting is hosted on the Adafruit Discord server. You can join any time by going to the URL adafru.it slash discord. We hold the meeting in the hashtag CircuitPython-dev text channel and the Circuit Python voice channel. This meeting typically happens at Mondays at 2 PM Eastern 11 AM Pacific, except when it coincides with the US holiday. If the meeting time is changed, we'll notify you via Discord. If you wish to be notified about changes to the meeting, we can add you to the Circuit Python Mista's Discord role. There is also a calendar available that we try to keep updated if you'd like to subscribe to that. This meeting is recorded. We record the audio from the voice channel and the video of the text channel. If you'd rather not have your voice recorded, you are still welcome to participate. The video of this meeting will be posted to YouTube, and the audio is released as a podcast. If you find this podcast is not available in your favorite podcast service, let us know. There is a note stock to accompany the meeting and recording. If you wish to participate but can't make it to the meeting, you can leave hug reports and status updates for us in the document, and we'll read them off during the meeting. The notes document also contains timestamps to go along with the video so you can use the Doctor View only the parts of the video that interests you most. The meeting tends to run 60 to 90 minutes, so this gives you the option to skip around. A link to the notes document is posted in the Circuit Python dev channel on the Eight of Fruit Discord every week. Check the pinned messages to find the latest note stock. This meeting is held in five parts. The first part is community news. This is a look at all things Circuit Python and Python and hardware in the community. It's a preview of our Python on microcontrollers newsletter. The second part is the state of Circuit Python libraries in Blinka. This is a statistical overview of the entire project. It's a chance to look at the project by the numbers separate from what we're all up to. The third part is hug reports. Hug reports is an opportunity to highlight the good things folks are doing, taking the time to recognize the awesome folks in our community. The fourth part is status updates. Status updates is an opportunity to sync up on what we've been up to. Take a couple of minutes and talk about what you've been doing in the last week since the last meeting and what you'll be up to over the next week until the next meeting. The fifth part is in the weeds. This is also the final part. In the weeds is an opportunity for more long form discussions. These discussions can come out of status updates or be something you've identified ahead of time that is too long for status updates. And that covers how the meeting will go. I will switch over to the note stock, take a time code, and get into community news. So community news is a chance for us to see all of the things that are happening in Circuit Python, Python and MicroPython, the wider world of all these things. So first up, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W was released last week. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2W was announced and released in limited quantities by the Raspberry Pi Trading Company. October 28 from the Raspberry Pi news, priced at $15. Raspberry Pi Zero 2 uses the same Broadcom BCM2710A1SOC system on the chip. Die as the launch version of the Raspberry Pi 3, with ARM cores slightly downclocked to 1 gigahertz, bundled into a single space-saving package alongside 512 megabytes of low-power DDR2 SD RAM. The exact performance uplift over the original Zero varies across workloads. But for a multi-threaded sysbench, it is almost exactly five times faster. And there's a number of links in the newsletter around the Zero 2W. So check out those links in the newsletter when it comes up tomorrow. Next up, the Pi Ladies talk on the basics of hardware with Circuit Python. Pi Ladies Southwest Florida host, Kira Hartledge, demonstrates how to use Circuit Python to control a Circuit Playground Bluefruit circuit board on YouTube. And there are links there to the resources for the presentation on GitHub. This is what happens when I'm typing ends and ends into the note stock, because that's the same key I used to do the mouse pointer. And Adafruit Halloween. Adafruit loves Halloween, both in making hardware-enabling people to build spooky things and decorating and dressing the part. Adafruit's electronic Halloween has been a staple for many years. Here is a selection of pictures of the Adafruit team from last Friday. Next up, the Melbourne MicroPython Meetup. The Melbourne MicroPython Meetup for October 27th had some interesting presentations. There's a link to the main slides there. Topics discussed includes a monitor for real-time MicroPython code, MicroPython Message Pack, a MicroSQL Lite library module for MicroPython, and a driver for the VL53L5CX, which is both for MicroPython and CircuitPython. And I should note that Matt, who runs Melbourne MicroPython Meetup, updated maybe four months' worth of MicroPython Meetup. So there's lots of good videos and stuff on his YouTube channel and the Melbourne MicroPython page on GitHub, too. So check those out. It's a great way to keep up with what's going on in MicroPython Lite. I watch and follow a lot of that. OK, next up, Halloween projects from around the web. One is a Halloween talking clock based on the Raspberry Pi Pico. Another is a jump-scare tombstone using an Adafruit Halloween M4 with CircuitPython. Someone put a moving eyeball in their door for tonight. Super janky, but should last long enough for trick or treating, thanks to the Adafruit QT Pi and Circuit Python. Next is a moving skull prop using an Adafruit Itsy Bitsy M0 programed in CircuitPython. And there's also a Halloween music box with CircuitPython on a Raspberry Pi Pico. And that's it for community news. The CircuitPython Weekly newsletter, which these topics were a preview of, is a CircuitPython community-run newsletter emailed every Tuesday. The complete archives are available at adafruitdaily.com slash category slash CircuitPython. It highlights the latest Python on hardware-related news from around the web, including CircuitPython, Python, and MicroPython developments. To contribute your own news or project, edit next week's draft on GitHub. The URL is github.com slash Adafruit slash CircuitPython dash weekly dash newsletter. Check out the drafts folder there. And submit a poll request with the changes. You can click the pencil icon in the top right to edit the file straight on the web. You may also tag a tweet with hashtag CircuitPython on Twitter or email cpenews at adafruit.com. And we'll add the topics there. OK, so that's the first section. The next section is the state of CircuitPython libraries in Blinka. It is a more statistical overview of the project, meant to ground us in the realities of things before we talk about the less tangible stuff. So overall, we had 49 poll requests merged from 28 different authors, which is awesome. Some folks to highlight. Aegiso, Lila, Plugowsky, Colorado Carlos, Process 1183, Techtrick, Ronnie Lomato, Jay Simmons, Zebular13, Tyler Crumpton, and Kerry K007 are all folks that we've highlighted as new. So thank you to all the new folks who are new authors to CircuitPython, the broad CircuitPython ecosystem. We had 12 reviewers. So thanks again to all of our reviewers for supporting all of those authors, especially the new ones. And issues-wise, overall, we had 30 closed issues by nine people and 16 opened by 12 people. So we're down 14, which is awesome. Next subsection we have here is the core. The stats for the core. This is just the C code base for CircuitPython. In that code base, we had 16 poll requests merged from 12 different authors. So thank you to all of our authors there. We had five reviewers. So thank you to all of our reviewers. We have seven open poll requests, which is pretty good for us. The oldest one is 58 days old. And the newest one is actually five days old. So now a whole lot of activity in the last few days since these stats were taken. Issues-wise, we had 11 closed issues by four people, six open by four people. So we're net down five, which is awesome, for a total of 444 open issues. We keep track of prioritization and our active milestones by assigning a milestone to issues. So the two main ones we have going right now is 7.x.x has 19 open issues. These are the ones that we think we should tackle kind of sooner rather than later. And then we also have a number of issues not assigned to milestones. It's currently negative 2, which is clearly not correct. So hopefully we don't have any, which is good. Overall, I think 7.0 has been really great. And we're definitely needing to do a 7.1 soon. So keep an eye out for a test build of 7.1, and then hopefully a stable version soon after that. If you want to try the things that will be in 7.1, you can always click Absolute Latest on circuitbython.org slash downloads. And thank you for to whomever is taking the notes for me, because I never managed to write it down. OK, next up, we have the library section. So I'll kick it over to Katnie for an update on the libraries. All right, thanks, Scott. So this applies to all of the Adafruit Circuit Python libraries, which is everything that starts with Adafruit underscore circuitbython underscore and a few other things, including the community bundle and our cookie cutter. Across all those repos, we had 29 pull requests merged from 14 different authors and 10 different reviewers. A number of those are some of the new folks that Scott highlighted when talking about things overall. I won't highlight them again, but I just want to say thanks to everyone who has been contributing. We had, that leaves us with 58 open pull requests. We had 18 issues closed by seven people and nine open by eight people, leaving us with 627 open issues. Of those, 266 are good first issues. If you're looking to contribute to Circuit Python on the Python side of things, check out circuitpython.org slash contributing. It has all of this information and more. And you can take a look at the issues, search them by label. Good first issue is an excellent place to start if you're new to everything or new to contributing to open source. You can take a look at those. Otherwise, you can check out bug or enhancement if you're looking for something a little more complicated. And just make a comment on that issue. Let us know you're working on it. And we are always available to help. If you're interested in getting started reviewing, take a look at the open pull requests. If you have the hardware, give it a test. If you don't, just look at the code for syntax or spelling or that sort of thing. Leave a comment and let us know that you took a look at it. That's always very helpful. And once you're comfortable with that, we can take a look at adding you to our review team. In terms of library updates in the last seven days, we had no new libraries, but a number of updated libraries that I will not read off. Overall, Hacktoberfest went quite well. Thank you so much to everyone who participated and a special thank you to the reviewers who made it possible. We had an influx of new folks, at least one of whom has begun contributing in other ways, which is great to see. As a side note, the Hacktoberfest labels on the issues were not removed. We're looking into why Adabot failed to do so. We may do it manually, quote unquote, and sort out Adabot later. Otherwise, we're still working through older PRs, which is also good. And finally, thanks to everyone who has been contributing and persisting through CI failures and so on to get PRs passing. That's what I've got. Thank you, Katnie. Okay, next up, Melissa's out today. So I am going to read off the stats for Blinka. Blinka is the CircuitPython API compatibility layer for single board computers like the Raspberry Pi, but also microcontrollers that are running MicroPython. So that's what this encompasses. We had four pull requests merged from four different authors. So thank you to all those different authors. There are currently three open pull requests, two on Blinka and one on Blinka BLEIO. The oldest is 264 days old. One issue closed by one person and one opened by one person, so net even. For a total of 65 open issues on Adafruit, github.com slash Adafruit slash Adafruit Blinka issues. Download numbers from Pi Wheels, downloads in the last month, 13,641, and the number of supportive boards stands at 76. And that's it for Stated CircuitPython Libraries in Blinka. Next up, we have Hug Reports. Hug Reports is a chance for us to say thank you to folks in our community for the awesome work that they are doing. I will start and then go through the list. So it's kind of a round robin, meaning to give everybody a chance to say something. If you do want to say something or have notes, go ahead and drop them in the note stock. If nothing's in the note stock, I'll just assume that you're not participating. Just listening in to say you're not participating may not be fair. Okay, for myself, two hugs. One to Skir. Seth for helping folks on the Discord was checking in and saw that he's been super helpful. So thank you, thank you Seth for being such a huge part of this community. And then also a hug report to MinikRee, my partner for finding a costume for me to wear on my stream last week. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, you should at least look at the thumbnail to see my Blinka costume from last week. Okay, now I'll circle around and read off folks as I hit them. First up, we have a hug report from Anecdata for MicroDev, says once again, for work on the monitor mode and humoring me on my naive questions. Next up is Dan. Okay, thank you. Two hug reports for bug reporters. Shabazzone's at 23, found that when they were plugging in a board with 7.00, it would sometimes erase the flash and they tested it in a systematic way and found out that a certain time interval during that period happened. So we have to try to reproduce that. And thanks to ToddBot for trying out some of the new HID device features with some longer than I expected values. And I have to make it possible to give larger values there. So thanks to ToddBot for that. Okay, thanks, Dan. For those of you who are listening who aren't watching the video actively, Jeff and Katni also meant to put in a picture of me for my stream. So if you wanna see what my costume was, you can check out the video now. You'll see it. Okay, next up we have Foamy Guy. All right, thanks Scott. First hug reports this week for Mark Gambler and Keith the EE for helping review the type annotation PRs. We had quite a few of those come in. So I was definitely happy to get help from those folks. And also for Katni went through a couple of times and spotted ones that we had missed and tagged us on them. So I appreciate that as well. Next tag report for all of the first time contributors from the past few weeks. I know we had quite a few that came in for Hacktoberfest. So I appreciate all of those folks who joined up and made their first contribution to the project. And then a group hug for everybody else. Thanks. Awesome, thank you Foamy Guy. Next up is Jepler. Hi, I have a group hug first of all and then one for Damian and Gemma. They took some time to chat with us about async IO last week. And I think the most interesting thing I got out of that conversation is just how much closer they made it a goal to be to desktop Python when they invented their async IO implemented their async IO module, which is a little bit of a change from where they started at. And that's cool. Anyway, and then my last hug is to Dan for digging into async and helping me start to understand it just a little bit as well. It's been one of those things that continues sailing over my head. And I know I'll get there and particularly with the help of other people guiding me through it a little bit. Awesome, thank you, Jeff. Next up, we have notes from Jerry who says a group hug. Just listening today. And after Jerry, we have Catni. All right, so first of all, hard report to Scott for running the meeting last minute when construction picked up here without warning. To Foamy Guy, this is again because I gave this hug report when the good first issues were created. But thank you for creating the good first issues heading into Hacktoberfest and then for keeping up with reviewing, testing, requesting changes and merging a majority of the subsequent PRs. Thank you to Mark Gambler and Keith EE for reviewing some of the Hacktoberfest type annotation PRs as well. And an extra special hug report to Foamy Guy for handling the last minute PRs that came in late last night, which I was really, really, really hoping wouldn't happen. But inevitably it did. Unrelated hug reports to Foamy Guy for adding explicit documentation links to the library readme's. We had the documentation bad, but that's kind of an obtuse way to get to the documentation. We never actually linked to the docs in a section of the readme and now we do. So that's across all the libraries. So thank you for adding that. Hug report to all the new folks who joined us for Hacktoberfest and contributed to the libraries over the last four weeks and a group hug. Awesome, thank you, Katni. All right, next up, we have notes from Melissa who says a hug report to Tanya and myself for getting the mobile device BLE circuit by then crash fixes so quickly and a group hug. Last up, I have notes from Mark Gambler who says hug report to Katni and Foamy Guy for helping review some PRs I had questions on. Hug report to Tectric for being a first time contributor and having patients when some strange issues occurred and a group hug. So that's it for hug reports. Next up is status updates. Status updates is done as around Robin as well, but this time we're talking briefly about what we've been up to. What we're working on the past week, what we hope to work on in the coming week. Again, I will start and then go through the list here. So first up for me, last week I was working on speeding up circuit Python execution on the Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi 4 specifically. And I managed to do it by basically setting everything up to be cacheable, which is cool. I'm sure we'll find bugs based on that because caching is hard. I started working on SD card support. Didn't make it super far. So that's what I'm primarily doing this week. My next step is to solder onto the Pi Unora so I can sniff the SD card lines. I will be working on SD card and if I get fed up with that, taking a break by setting up boards and adding the zero 2W support, which I plan on probably working on on Friday as well. I should also say that I took a little time last week to Melissa had tickled the crash in the Bealee workflow that was due to Android devices doing a transmission unit size of 20 bytes. And when I had added the 64 bit timestamp, I had caused that code to crash. So there is now a fix in CircuitPython for that. So that's one reason I think we're gonna wanna do 7.1 pretty soon is because the Bealee workflow from Android devices will cause crashes otherwise. So that's it for me. And next up, we'll go to Dan. Okay, thanks. So the main thing and almost the only thing that the past week was work a lot on AsyncIO, which is using, there are these Async and await keywords in CircuitPython to do cooperative multitasking. They just are sort of syntactic sugar for helping to do that. And AsyncIO is one library to do that. It's in CPython and MicroPython has a stripped down version of AsyncIO, it's not a library, it's built into MicroPython. It's frozen in, but I just took it out and made it a library and changed a few lines and I got it to work on CircuitPython. I had to make a few CircuitPython core changes too, but not very many. So I have an example where I have two LEDs running in two different cooperative multitasks or cooperative tasks, one's blinking at one rate and one's blinking at the other rate and they're blinking independently. So the basic idea works. There's some issues about I'm seeing some weird crashes occasionally when the board starts up and the next thing I will look at is seeing if I can add Async constructs to like the LED animation library, which is one of those libraries where you really wanna be able to interrupt a long running thing and change what it's doing or just stop it all together. Okay. Awesome, thank you, Dan. Next up is FOMI guy. All right. So this past week, definitely still reviewing lots of the typing PRs. Most of those came in for Hacktoberfest. I imagine that will slow down a little bit, but we do still have all the open issues. So I'll keep an eye out for any of those that people keep working on. I, on my stream over the weekend, I worked on a Pac-Man style game and I got the bulk of the functionality done. So players and walls and ghosts and pellets are all working, you can move around. This runs on a Pico device with a little add-on screen. I also did some refactoring to try to separate out the actual game specific code away from the helper object that I created previously to kind of import maps from the tiled game map editor software. So I had those kind of convoluted and paired together a little bit and I got those a lot more generalized and broken apart. And I have a couple ideas for some twists that I like to add on to the game that are not in the original version, at least as far as I'm aware. So I'll be playing with that a little bit more and doing some of those in the next coming weeks. Another thing that popped up that I kind of want to try to do this week is make a selectable list widget for display IO. So it will display like a vertical list of strings and it will give you a little arrow or something that points to one and the user has the ability to go up and down through the list and then enter on whichever one is selected. So this could be used for like menus and selecting settings and all sorts of things where you have a list of strings that you want the user to pick one from. And the other thing I have, which we talked about in the weeds last week is trying out that Stubbs Generator Library and working out a proposal for how we can include PYI Stubbs in libraries that are not currently deployed onto PyPy. So that's what I got for this week. Thanks. Awesome, thank you filming guy. All right, next up is Jephler. Yeah, I just have to get back to my notes because I was doing something else. So easy to get distracted. Yeah, so last week my focus was on camera stuff again. I got the animated gift saving up to 10 frames per second if you go down to the 240 by 240 resolution, which is still pretty cool. I added color dithering so it works really well and it looks really good, doesn't decrease the frame rate much. And then I started on black and white dither. So this week I'm gonna continue working on the black and white dither of images from the camera and the goal is to get it photo printing to a thermal printer this week. So I'll be able to take a picture, maybe save it to the SD card as an intermediate step or maybe just immediately send it out the printer. And then one thing standing in the way of that is according to the inline comments of the thermal printer library, the bitmap mode doesn't work on circuit Python. It's ended like the author wasn't exactly sure why. So I need to figure out what's up with that and get it working. So yeah, that's the next thing that I will be doing after trying to optimize the black and white dither just a little bit more. It would be nice if it was as smooth as, well, it won't be as smooth as, but it would be nice if you could preview it on the LCD and not have it feel slow. So yeah, that's what's up. It's camera, camera, camera, camera. Awesome, thank you, Jeff. All right, next up is Ketny. Hello. So last week I published the VL53L1X guide. It is a time of flight distance sensor that has a very long range. So if you picked up one of those, the guide is published. I continued overhauling the welcome to circuit Python guide. Submitted a PR to the court, update all example references to board.d13 to board.led where applicable. Recorded some audio clips for a project being done by Philby, Noah and Pedro. I believe there's gonna be video clips of that.  Migrated our PyPI builds to be using an API key instead of login credentials. I actually met with the PyPI package manager. They put out a feedback form a while back. A while, like the last two weeks. Asking how people use PyPI with a team of people and what issues or features or whatever they would want or need to continue doing that. And their next step was to actually meet with folks who provided feedback. So I agreed to meet with them. And they asked quite a few questions. And one of the things I talked about was the fact that part of how we deal with PyPI is we do have a single account with shared credentials. And how that can be not the greatest way to deal with things but also a little frustrating if we do have to change those credentials because those are used for all of our builds. And unrelated to the conversation in terms of like team usage. One of the other people in the meeting suggested that they're relatively recently PyPI added API keys that can be used in lieu of login credentials. So I updated our stuff to use that which I think is really good. I updated the circuit Python core documentation troubleshooting page. A user reported some confusion in there and the confusion was actually just a typo but after looking at the whole page it was extremely out of date. So it's much better now. On Sunday I went through some Hacktoberfest PRs as well as some other PRs in between and finally put together a list of suggested updated product photos for the aid photographer. So we have some options to use moving forward that are more up to date. Pretty much all the multi-board images we have right now are M0 boards, which we are A, trying to encourage folks not to use and B, they're just older. We have so many new products. It would be great to be able to in a guide have an image that is a series of updated products. So that's what we're going for there and apparently the plan is to try and do them over time because the list was pretty extensive. So that's where that is. This week continue the circuit Python, welcome to circuit Python guide overhaul. The last things to do are update the welcome to the community guide page, write the circuit Python documentation page and write the how do I learn Python page. As a sort of addition to that, I'm going to be adding in the LED animation library guide a page on how to load part of a library. This will be linked in the welcome guide but it won't be part of the welcome guide because really the main library that this applies to is the LED animation library. It doesn't fit on M0 boards and a lot of people want to use it with M0 boards and the answer is to load only the animations you want to use, but simply telling someone to do that is a support nightmare because we don't have it documented anywhere. So the plan is to document that so that we actually have something to point folks to. So they're, you know, Neopixel Trinky or whatever can run LED animations, at least part of them at any given point in time. Some of them will never work on M0, even just the one animation but a lot of them will run if you only load the ones that you need. I'm putting together a list of new Blanka art ideas if you have any for us to consider, please let me know. Tag me on Discord at Katni. I don't know that we will do all of them, obviously, but we haven't done a new series of Blanka art in a while so we started a list internally and I'm happy to consider anything other folks want to suggest. And then I need to fix one of the links on the CircuitPython Chordox troubleshooting page that changed inside the Learn Guide. I will be getting some feedback on the Welcome Guide once it's done or finalized anyway because the idea is to create a better experience for folks who are going through the guide, so I will either contact some folks directly or just put it out there to say, please take a look at this guide and let me know if you have any suggestions. And then finally, I will be updating the Read Me on the Pretty Pins repo so that the process is actually documented. It's not currently documented anywhere. I'm really the only one doing it at the moment but it would be nice if other folks are able to do it as well. So despite that, the documentation will be written for myself but if other folks can pick it up and figure it out, that would also be great. And then I will be doing more Pretty Pins diagrams. That's what I've got. Awesome, thank you Katni. All right, last up, I've got notes from Maker Mubasa. If anybody has topics for in the weeds, now's the time to put them there. There are none currently, so we're approaching the end otherwise. Okay, so Maker Mubasa says, last week finished up mobile sizing optimizations for CircuitPython code editor, updated the file transfer library to work with the fixed CircuitPython bug, updated the CircuitPython code editor to be much more reliable with connections, added a busy animation which makes the editor seem much more responsive. Kind of amazing how that works. Updated color scheme to be much easier to read. And this week, working on wrapping up the code editor with remaining items on the to-do list, possibly start working on a guide for the code editor if there are no major things to change and we can get a new version of CircuitPython released with the bug fixes. And for those of you who don't know, this is code.CircuitPython.org is what Melissa's working on. So it uses web Bluetooth to talk to CircuitPython devices. And that's it for status updates. In the weeds, we don't have any topics but just as a reminder for folks, it is a chance for us to have any longer form discussions that we'd like to have. We don't have any this week but if you ever do have things that you'd like to bring up to the audience of folks who are here, feel free to join the meeting or drop a topic in the notes. We'd be happy to cover it. All right, and let's move on to wrap up. Let me switch as well. So this has been the CircuitPython Weekly meeting for November 1st, 2021. Thank you to everybody who participated. If you want to support Adafruit and CircuitPython and those of us that work on CircuitPython for Adafruit, consider purchasing from the Adafruit shop at Adafruit.com. The video this meeting will be released on YouTube at youtube.com slash Adafruit and the podcast will be available in major podcast services. It will also be featured in the Python for Microcontrollers newsletter visit adafruitdaily.com to subscribe. The next meeting will be held next Monday at 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific. However, note if you're outside of the U.S., the U.S. will switch from summer to winter time next Sunday. So if you're outside of the U.S., the time will change for you because we keep it at U.S. time and U.S. time is changing. So the next meeting is at November 8th at 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, which is UTC minus five. So just keep that in mind if you're outside of the U.S. that the time will change for you even though the time is technically not changing for us in the U.S. This meeting is held on the Adafruit Discord, which you can join by going to the URL adafruit.it slash discord, it's our URL shortener. To be notified about the meeting and any changes to the time or day, you can ask to be added to the at-circuit-python-nesus role on Discord. Standard time, yep. And in summary, that is why daylight saving time should be abolished, Jeff. I agree. With that, we hope to see you all next week and we'll try to do an extra reminder just because of the time change. So thank you all and we'll see you on the Discord. Thanks everyone.