Fiat Money

Should the U.S. government create a digital dollar?
Banking Regulation, Commodity Money, Digital Money, Fiat Money, Financial Innovation, Money & Politics, News, The Fed & Central Banks

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Proposals for “central bank digital currency” (CBDC) come in two basic types: account-based and token-based. I have been critical of proposals for an account-based system. Until recently, there didn’t seem to be much active interest in a token-based system. But now comes a significant token-based proposal in…

A budget in chains.
Banking Regulation, Fiat Money, Money & Politics, News, The Fed & Central Banks

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One of the more controversial provisions of the CARES Act consists of the $454 billion it allows the U.S. Treasury to devote to "backstopping"  (that is, to supplying partial funding for) the Federal Reserve's emergency lending. In a previous post, I argued that these Treasury backstops help…

gold, bimetallism, silver, gold standard, bitcoin
Commodity Money, Digital Money, Fiat Money, Money & Politics, News

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When Bitcoin’s price spiked in 2017, so did public mentions of the cryptocurrency, as measured by a Google n-gram plot. When William Jennings Bryan promoted bimetallism during his run for President in 1896, mentions of bimetallism similarly spiked. Noting this parallel, economist Robert Shiller compares the two…