Readers interested in monetary data should see a book-length working paper, just issued, called Currency Board Financial Statements, that I prepared with Nicholas Krus. It is the further fruit of the Digital Archive on Currency Boards, which Nick played the largest part in gathering. Spreadsheets that accompany the paper give annual balance sheet data and sometimes more frequent statistics of currency in circulation. As I said in a previous post, free banking needs something like it (and I am working on the archive part, although others will have to photograph the source documents and digitize the data). The data on currency boards will be useful to anyone interested in the economic history of the many countries concerned before they established central banks, which in many cases has only been during my lifetime. Be warned that working paper is a kind of catalog of cases and is not intended to be read from front to back. It is a first version; we expect to obtain and post more data over the next year or so.

The working paper is a preliminary project for the last book I ever intend to write on currency boards, with Steve Hanke and Nick Krus as my coauthors. We are trying to make our work definitive since we don't think anybody after will be quite as concerned to get the data as we are. Because of the work involved with the book, which will not be finished until at least 2016, and forthcoming changes to the Free Banking blog, this will be my last post. I approve of the forthcoming changes, but some of them will make this blog a less suitable place for me to express opinions. I will continue to post items on monetary history or data occasionally at the blog of the Center for Financial Stability, where I edit the Historical Financial Statistics data set. In 2015 Historical Financial Statistics will expand to  incorporate the data from my working paper and much else, and I welcome potential contributions of monetary data of free banking systems, or other economic statistics, from readers of the Free Banking blog.