If the recent yield curve panic proves anything, it proves that, in financial markets, what may start out as a mere statistical correlation, and possibly a spurious one, can become a genuine causal relationship. In particular, if enough people subscribe to a post-hoc fallacy, it may not…
The Spring/Summer 2019 edition of the Cato Journal, the Cato Institute’s interdisciplinary journal of public policy, is now available online. This issue features papers from Cato’s 36th Annual Monetary Conference held last November, ten years after the financial panic of 2008. At that conference, leading scholars and policymakers discussed…
Two recent announcements by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have proponents of increased financial regulation up in arms. The first is the Bureau’s expansion of its no-action letter policy to include a regulatory sandbox. A sandbox is a program which allows firms to offer new products under…
Founded by Cato’s vice president for monetary studies James A. Dorn in 1983, the Cato Institute’s Annual Monetary Conference has kept the monetary policy conversation alive in Washington, DC, for nearly four decades — even at times when a calcified consensus made the topic seem unimportant. The…
The end of this month (31 October 2018) will mark the 10th anniversary of the online posting of the now-famous white paper by “Satoshi Nakamoto” outlining the concept of “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” This is an opportune occasion to compare what Bitcoin has achieved with…