Commodity Money

Should the U.S. government create a digital dollar?
Banking Regulation, Commodity Money, Digital Money, Fiat Money, Financial Innovation, Money & Politics, News, The Fed & Central Banks

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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…

Banking Regulation, Commodity Money, Economic History, Money & Politics, News, The Fed & Central Banks

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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…

fed independence, alternative currencies, fed, federal reserve, cato monetary conference
Banking Regulation, Commodity Money, Currency Boards, Digital Money, Economic History, Events, Free Banking, Inflation & Deflation, Money & Politics, News, The Fed & Central Banks

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  From President Trump lobbing invectives against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Twitter to progressives clamoring for the Federal Reserve to use monetary policy to finance social projects, our central bank’s independence looks increasingly tenuous. Recently, Chairman Powell called for an internal "strategic review" of how…

Commodity Money, Fiat Money, Inflation & Deflation, News

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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…