Financial innovations like mobile money have gained fame for transforming commerce in the developing world. But they're also helping the poor escape poverty. In an earlier post, I showed how over the past few years M-PESA and other kinds of "mobile money" have made sending money across…
Sebastian Mallaby's biography of Alan Greenspan does just about everything right. Despite its length, it's eminently readable. Yet there's nothing superficial about it: Mallaby seems no less comfortable with economics than he is with English, allowing expert monetary and macro-economists to join non-expert readers in both enjoying and…
ONCE UPON A TIME, when my twin brother and I were tots, our father convinced us that he could make a traffic light change from red to green whenever he wanted it to. Raising his hand to the light as we sat at an intersection, he would…
News accounts and analyses on other blogs have usefully described and critically assessed the "demonetization" shock that Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave the Indian economy on November 8. Here we emphasize two features of Modi's initiative that have been little noticed. First, the combination of demonetization followed…
More than two hundred people came to Cato last Thursday, November 17th, for the 34th Annual Monetary Conference. Four panels and two keynote speakers covered "Central Banks and Financial Turmoil," the theme of this year's conference. In his introduction, CMFA's James Dorn laid out some of the key…