“The Lights Go Out in Lebanon as Financial Collapse Accelerates,” declared a recent headline in The Washington Post. The headline refers specifically to worsening power outages but more generally to Lebanon’s ongoing “economic implosion.” This breakdown is due in large part to chaos in Lebanon’s monetary and…
Proposals for “central bank digital currency” (CBDC) come in two basic types: account-based and token-based. I have been critical of proposals for an account-based system. Until recently, there didn’t seem to be much active interest in a token-based system. But now comes a significant token-based proposal in…
Money-market mutual funds (MMMFs) have had a turbulent couple of weeks. On March 18, the Federal Reserve System created a Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF) to “assist money market funds in meeting demands for redemptions by households and other investors.” What’s the source of the…
When Bitcoin’s price spiked in 2017, so did public mentions of the cryptocurrency, as measured by a Google n-gram plot. When William Jennings Bryan promoted bimetallism during his run for President in 1896, mentions of bimetallism similarly spiked. Noting this parallel, economist Robert Shiller compares the two…
Milton Friedman (1951, 1960) provided influential back-of-the-envelope estimates of the costs devoted to extracting gold under what he called a “strict” gold standard. I have criticized those estimates elsewhere (White 1999, pp. 42-48) for exaggerating the volume of gold reserves used by actual gold-standard economies, and thus…