Jesús Huerta de Soto

Huerta de Soto received a bachelor's degree in economics in 1978 and a PhD in economics in 1992, from Complutense University. His MBA in actuarial science is from Stanford University, 1985. In 2000, he became a full professor of Political Economy at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. Since 2007 he is director of the Austrian Economics Master Program Master Economía de la Escuela Austríaca at the Rey Juan Carlos University.

Huerta de Soto was editor of seven volumes of the Spanish-language version of the University of Chicago Press's The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek. In that capacity, he was responsible for bibliographies, footnotes, introductions, and hiring translators. He is a member of the editorial board of New Perspectives on Political Economy and on the advisory editorial board of the Journal of Markets and Morality. Huerta de Soto is a Senior Fellow of the Mises Institute and is on the editorial board of its Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He was formerly a Trustee of the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies (IMDEA) in social sciences and was a vice-president and director of the Mont Pelerin Society from 2000 to 2004.

Austrian business cycle and full reserve banking

Huerta de Soto advocates full-reserve banking, a system in which 100% reserve requirements for banks would prevent any expansion of credit.

In 2006, Huerta de Soto wrote an 876-page book on the subject, published in English by the Mises Institute as Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles. Samuel Gregg reviewed the book writing that "[t]he sheer length of this text will demand much time and concentration of readers wishing to fully absorb its insights. Certainly there is an element of repetition at different points. This tends, however, to reflect De Soto's determination to demonstrate that the moral, legal, and economic dimensions of money, credit, and banking cannot be artificially separated from each other without risking the loss of a sound understanding of the subject." In the journal New Perspectives on Political Economy, Ludwig van den Hauwe suggested that "[e]ven if it may be difficult at this time to gauge in any precise manner the effect the book will have on the economics profession at large, there can be no doubt the book is destined to become a classic, both by virtue of the subject matters that are treated and in virtue of the manner in which they are treated: thoroughly and authoritatively."

Larry J. Sechrest's review of Huerta de Soto's book, also published by the Mises Institute, stated that the author attempted to provide "final and decisive proof" that fractional reserve banking is incompatible with private property rights, morality, and a stable economy. Sechrest wrote that although Huerta de Soto presented a painstaking investigation of legal theory, banking history, business cycles, and medieval theological doctrine, a great deal of it is irrelevant to the book's thesis. Sechrest concludes "Above all, Huerta de Soto refuses to even consider the possibility that banks' customers may have been quite willing to face some risk exposure in exchange for the benefits 100 percent reserve banks are unable to provide" and believes that "any departure from 100 percent reserve banking is automatically taken to be evidence of malfeasance by bankers, even when there is no clear data on the details of the contractual relations negotiated by depositors."

In his chapter on "Attempts to Legally Justify Fractional-Reserve Banking", Huerta de Soto considers the possibility "that a certain group of bank customers (or for the sake of argument, all of them) enter into a deposit contract aware and fully accepting that banks will invest (or loan, etc.) a large portion of the money they deposit". In this case, argues Huerta de Soto, "the supposed authorization from the depositors lacks legal validity" because few lay-persons understand the instability inherent in fractional-reserve banking: they believe their deposit is guaranteed, which Huerta de Soto considers a (near universal) misconception. As evidence of the true wishes of depositors, he cites the riots that resulted when banks suspended payments during the 1998–2002 Argentine great depression.