"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand." (Attributed to Milton Friedman) While my fellow Fed-watchers have had their eyes firmly glued to the repo-market for several weeks now, I've been preoccupied with…
How should central bankers provide aid to struggling financial institutions during a panic? Ask 19th-century economic theorist Walter Bagehot. Or, if you can't do that, ask his biographer: acclaimed author, publisher, and monetary scholar James Grant. Join Grant and the Cato Institute's George Selgin on Wednesday, September…
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…