"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert," the economist Milton Friedman once quipped, "in five years there'd be a shortage of sand." The U.S. Mint, to its credit, had a much longer run. The Federal Reserve, which purchases coins from the Mint…
China-based cryptocurrency exchange BTCC suspended all domestic trading in yuan last weekend. The decision came on the heels of a September 5 statement from regulatory authorities in China, which required all domestic cryptocurrency exchanges publish closing announcements, stop registering new users, and establish a schedule to cease…
In a recent blog post, St. Louis Fed Vice President David Andolfatto suggests that central banks "consider offering digital money services (possibly even a cryptocurrency) at the retail and wholesale level." His reasoning is straightforward. Bitcoin, he observes, offers a host of benefits, most of which relate…
It isn't every day that University of Chicago economists Eugene Fama and Richard Thaler see eye to eye. Fama, who won the Nobel Prize in 2013, is one of the best known proponents of the efficient market hypothesis. Thaler, in contrast, champions behavioral economics. Indeed, Thaler spends…