Skip to content

Alt-M

Ideas for an Alternative Monetary Future

Alt-M

Ideas for an Alternative Monetary Future

  • Home
  • About
    • DMCA
    • Donate
    • Terms of Use
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact
  • Contributors
    • George Selgin
    • Larry White
    • Hu McCulloch
    • James Dorn
    • Diego Zuluaga
  • Categories
  • Archives
  • Primer
George Selgin
About George Selgin
George Selgin is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Georgia. His research covers a broad range of topics within the field of monetary economics, including monetary history, macroeconomic theory, and the history of monetary thought. He is the author of The Theory of Free Banking (Rowman & Littlefield, 1988), Bank Deregulation and Monetary Order (Routledge, 1996), Less Than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy (The Institute of Economic Affairs, 1997), and, most recently, Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage (University of Michigan Press, 2008). Selgin is one of the founders, along with Kevin Dowd and Lawrence H. White, of the Modern Free Banking School, which draws its inspiration from the writings of Friedrich Hayek on denationalization of money and choice in currency. Selgin has written for numerous scholarly journals, including the British Numismatic Journal, The Economic Journal, the Economic History Review, the Journal of Economic Literature, and the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, and for popular outlets such as The Christian Science Monitor, The Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. Selgin retired from the University of Georgia to join Cato in September 2014. He has also taught at George Mason University, the University of Hong Kong, and West Virginia University. He holds a B.A. in economics and zoology from Drew University, and a Ph.D. in economics from New York University.
Federal Reserve, floor system, interest on excess reserves, operating framework
Financial Markets, Money & Politics, The Fed & Central Banks

The Fed's Shifting Goalposts

George Selgin/May 16, 2019May 16, 2019 /Leave a comment

When I published Floored! last October, I thought I'd said all I could say concerning the adverse consequences of the Fed's then decade-old decision to adopt a "floor"-type operating system. In the new arrangement, the Fed pays interest on bank reserves, and uses changes in the rate…

Continue reading
modern monetary theory, Stephanie Kelton, deficits, fiscal spending, monetary policy
Money & Politics, News, The Fed & Central Banks

The Nice Limits of Modern Monetary Theory

George Selgin/May 10, 2019May 14, 2019 /24 Comments

In my Twitter feed the other day, I came across a link to a website "dedicated to explaining and promoting awareness of Modern Monetary Theory." The site is called "We CAN Have Nice Things," and its summary of MMT seems to me to represent reasonably well how…

Continue reading
Federal Reserve, repo facility, term auction facility
Banking Regulation, News, The Fed & Central Banks

The Fed's New Repo Plan

George Selgin/May 2, 2019May 3, 2019 /9 Comments

I'm not the gambling sort. However, were I so I'd bet dollars to donuts that the Standing Repo Facility (henceforth "SRF") plan proposed by David Andolfatto and Jane Ihrig in a pair of St. Louis Fed articles (here and here) will be an important topic of discussion…

Continue reading
Stephen Moore, commodity prices, nominal GDP, monetary rules, monetary policy
Money & Politics, The Fed & Central Banks

More on Commodity Price Targeting

George Selgin/April 9, 2019April 12, 2019 /2 Comments

In a previous post, I argued that Paul Volcker didn't put a stop to inflation by having the Fed systematically increase interest rates when commodity prices rose, and lower them when commodity prices fell. While commodity-price targeting, aka a "price rule" for monetary policy, had some prominent…

Continue reading
Paul Volcker, Stephen Moore, commodity prices, inflation, price level target
News, The Fed & Central Banks

Stephen Moore's Other Volcker Rule

George Selgin/March 25, 2019April 11, 2019 /19 Comments

(Author's Note, April 11, 2019: I have made some slight revisions to this article in response to criticisms of the original by Bob Murphy, for which I sincerely thank him.) Of many dubious claims that recent Federal Reserve Board nominee Stephen Moore made in a Wall Street…

Continue reading
 

Posts navigation

‹12345›»

Follow

Print

Subscribe


Contributors

  • George Selgin
  • Larry White
  • Hu McCulloch
  • James Dorn
  • Diego Zuluaga

Categories

  • Banking Regulation (61)
  • Booms & Busts (24)
  • Commodity Money (63)
  • Currency Boards (14)
  • Digital Money (82)
  • Economic History (143)
  • Economic Thought (145)
  • Events (46)
  • Fiat Money (60)
  • Financial Innovation (33)
  • Financial Markets (113)
  • Free Banking (200)
  • Inflation & Deflation (63)
  • Monetary Policy Primer (12)
  • Money & Politics (223)
  • News (136)
  • Recommended Reading (94)
  • The Fed & Central Banks (310)
  • Uncategorized (11)

Recent Posts

  • Fannie and Freddie Need Fixing—Urgently: A Response to Joe Nocera
  • Why There Has Been No Great Reversal in U.S. Banking
  • Warren Mosler and the Great American Banking Myth
  • Stop the Presses! or, How the Fed Can Avoid Reserve Shortages without Bulking-Up,
    Part 2
  • Stop the Presses! or, How the Fed Can Avoid Reserve Shortages without Bulking-Up,
    Part 1
  • Cato's 37th Annual Monetary Conference: A Shadow Review of Fed Policy
  • Financial Inclusion without Finance? The Misguided Quest to Limit Choice in Consumer Credit

Recent Comments

  • MJoffe on Fannie and Freddie Need Fixing—Urgently: A Response to Joe Nocera
  • Bill Bergman on Fannie and Freddie Need Fixing—Urgently: A Response to Joe Nocera
  • Per Kurowski on Warren Mosler and the Great American Banking Myth
  • Selgin on Warren Mosler and the Great American Banking Myth
  • Per Kurowski on Warren Mosler and the Great American Banking Myth

About Us

Welcome to Alt-M, a community devoted to exploring and promoting ideas for an alternative monetary future. Our goal is to reveal the shortcomings of today’s centralized, bureaucratic, and discretionary monetary arrangements, and to bring serious consideration of real alternatives to the center stage of current monetary and financial reform debates.

Sponsors

Liberty and Privacy Network
This work by the Cato Institute and the Liberty and Privacy Network is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
DMCA | Privacy Policy
top