“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…
Cato’s Annual Monetary Conference last November hosted a “shadow review” of the Federal Reserve’s own self-review, dedicated to examining “whether the U.S. monetary policy framework can be improved to meet future challenges.” The articles in the spring/summer 2020 issue of the Cato Journal, drawn from that conference,…
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…
Watching the frenzy surrounding Judy Shelton’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee on February 13, one is led to believe that the gold standard is a “nutty” idea, for which no serious economist or monetary policymaker could possibly have a kind word. This post critiques that…
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…