An interesting debate has arisen in Ecuador during recent weeks over the following proposition advanced by authors at a Quito think tank: a dollarized country shouldn’t reduce its tariffs when the dollar is overvalued relative to the currencies of its regional trading partners (according to purchasing-power-parity measures)…
By now everyone has heard of Libra, the new private digital money system announced last week, sponsored by Facebook and a consortium of other firms, to be rolled out in 2020. The project’s official white paper, “An Introduction to Libra,” calls it “a new decentralized blockchain, a…
Proposed nominees Stephen Moore and Herman Cain having dropped out of contention, discussion continues over the Trump administration’s possible next nomination to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. The views of the latest candidate under consideration by the administration, Judy Shelton, have revived a question that commentators…
Stephen Moore and Herman Cain, the two recent nominees to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, have in the past suggested returning to a gold standard (although Moore now says he favors merely consulting a broad range of commodity prices as leading indicators). In response, a number…
John Maynard Keynes once marveled at “how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam.” (Bedlam was the nickname of a London madhouse.) Keynesian or New Keynesian macroeconomists who start with the mistaken premise that a central bank cannot fight recession except by lowering…