Background
William was born in the United States.
William was born in the United States.
After retiring from a career as a businessman and engineer, William F. Hixson began to write. The first his book, A Matter of Interest: Re-examining Money, Debt, and Real Economic Growth was published in 1991. Concluded critic Robert Pollin, “Regardless of how one responds to the details of Hixson’s proposals, A Matter of Interest is a serious attempt to grapple with the issues before us. As such, it should become a useful resource in building both the economic understanding and political will necessary for constructing a more equitable and viable financial system.” Liebling declared, “This volume should provoke educated general readers as well as others to compare these views with standard principles of macroeconomics on the debt burden issue.”
Hixson’s second book, the 1993 Triumph of the Bankers: Money and Banking in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, explored the evil (in Hixson’s view) effects of banks’ having usurped the governmental function of money-creation through such means as paper money, checking accounts, and credit cards. John J. McCusker, writing in the Journal of American History, opined, “This ‘call to arms’ is very much in the spirit of William Jennings Bryan.”
Hixson believed that although the Great Depression was inevitable given the economic arrangements of the laissez-faire era, the present system is untenable as well, and must be replaced within the next few decades or even sooner.
Further, Hixson quarrels with the current practice by which the Federal Reserve Board manipulates interest rates in order to moderate growth and thus, in theory, curb inflation. He posits also that corporations should finance themselves through equity rather than debt. Hixson feels the government should finance its operations solely through its money-creating power, printing more money when the economy needs stimulation and less when it does not. As a corollary, Hixson declares that private lending institutions must no longer have the power to create money by lending out the great majority of their deposits at interest. In a banking system in which banks were required to keep one hundred percent of their deposits on hand, there would be far less reliance on debt, and no need for federal deposit insurance, Hixson declares.