Here is my long promised, though not likely long anticipated, post on the "backing" theory of money. The modern controversy over "backing" originates from this article by Neil Wallace and Thomas Sargent. In the article they offer " a simple model that is compatible with the principle of finance…
Earlier this month Hong Kong passed a milestone: 30 years since it re-established a currency board system. The 99 years since the start of World War I have been quite turbulent in terms of monetary policy. Not many places have stuck with the same exchange rate, or,…
Paul Marks, a frequent poster of comments, claims that the concept of a gold standard is misleading because "either gold is the money or it is not." Sorry, the epigones of Murray Rothbard need to learn a lot more monetary history here. There are many kinds of…
Today the United States switched from daylight savings time to standard time. Europe has already done so, as Lars Christensen noted in a recent post. Lars used the occasion, as I will, to bring up Milton Friedman's analogy between daylight savings time and floating exchange rates in…
Lars Christensen's blog The Market Monetarist, which I make sure to read regularly, used the recent centenary of Milton Friedman's birth to discuss Friedman's views on exchange rates. The standard view of Friedman was that he was an advocate of flexible exchange rates, pure and simple. I…