David Glasner and Scott Sumner recently wrote good posts on the gold standard. In my next post I will try to put the issues in a larger context, but for the moment I will take a narrower, scattershot approach of responding to some criticisms of the gold…
I regret taxing readers’ patience with another post on the gold standard. As I and other bloggers here have made clear, a free banking system need not be a gold standard system. If people want the standard to be gold, that’s what free banks will offer to…
At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok notes David Warsh’s claim, seconded by Paul Krugman, that “Friedrich Hayek is not an important figure in the history of macroeconomics.” Apparently Warsh and Krugman have no memory of the 20th century. The big issue of the century in economic theory and…
Central banking has undergone drastic changes during the last 100 years that are often unappreciated today. Before World War I, most central banks were partly or entirely privately owned. They were not expected to spur economic growth or smooth business cycles. Rather, they defined their goals more…
(Both parts of this article originally appeared, under the title "Fractional Reserves and Economic Development," on the short-lived Free Market News Network.) __________________________ When Adam Smith first drew attention to the benefits of fractional-reserve banking, those benefits were but a glimmer of far more impressive gains…