During the Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – A.D. 9), the question of monetary freedom was vigorously debated. There were as yet no banks or paper money in China — money consisted solely of coin. Private mints competed with government mints, either in the shadow market or…
The world lost a great champion of liberty with the passing of Allan Meltzer, a longtime Professor of Political Economy at Carnegie Mellon University. Allan was a prodigious worker who wrote hundreds of articles and more than ten books, including his monumental A History of the Federal…
The Cato Institute recently released Monetary Alternatives: Rethinking Government Fiat Money, a collection of essays 30 years in the making. As George Selgin explains in the foreword, The complacency wrought by the Great Moderation, not to mention the limited interest in fundamental monetary reform before then, resulted…
Monetarism is often misunderstood, overlooked, forgotten, or even derided. Yet its basic logic, resting on the quantity theory of money, is evident and remains important in a world of pure fiat monies. Most major central banks have abandoned monetary targeting in favor of setting interest rates to…
There are two versions of the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL); one true, the other false. The true version holds that if the fiscal authority dominates the policy space, then fiscal deficits could be monetized by the central bank. This version is consistent with the…