ABSTRACT
Monetary reform was an obsession that Liberty shared with much of the American labor and radical movement, an obsession whose intensity roughly corresponded to downturns in the business cycle. The individualist anarchist answer to the money monopoly was, at least in theory, "free banking", in which any individual could issue her own notes as currency, typically backing them up with some promise that they could be redeemed in real property. Money and credit are still essential, though usually discussed at the national level, example: third-world development, establishing convertible currencies in the former communist party-states of Eastern Europe. In a "mutual bank", a group of individuals would pool pledges to their property and issue notes as a bank. Because of the general consensus among the anarchists in Liberty on mutual banking, there were very few general explanations of the money monopoly, of interest, or of mutual banking.
