Recently I talked to the French economist Philippe Nataf, who has written about France’s era of partly free banking in the early 19th century (in The Experience of Free Banking, edited by Kevin Dowd and published in 1992). He mentioned to me that Friedrich Hayek once told…
Yeah, I know: it's been so long since I posted here that you'd have a right to wonder whether I decided to quit economics and enter a monastery, or had simply dropped dead. In fact I've done neither, though I've had reason enough to be tempted by…
In the internet boom of the 1990s, there was a rush of new alternative payment systems or currencies (Paypal being the most successful). Forbes even ran a great cover story on this issue Politics for the Really Cool. For whatever combination of reasons (the tech being too…