Milton Friedman (1951, 1960) provided influential back-of-the-envelope estimates of the costs devoted to extracting gold under what he called a "strict" gold standard. I have criticized those estimates elsewhere (White 1999, pp. 42-48) for exaggerating the volume of gold reserves used by actual gold-standard economies, and thus…
The French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, delivered a scathing rebuke to Libra, the Facebook-led digital currency initiative, in the Financial Times this morning. Coming on the heels of several U.S. companies' withdrawal from the initiative after they received threatening letters from Senators Sherrod Brown and Brian…
The Zimbabwe government is back to its old money-printing tricks. As demand for Zimbabwe dollars dwindles, the government has ramped up restrictions on the use of substitutes. Late last month, as reported by Bloomberg News, "Zimbabwe's government gave the central bank powers to impose civil penalties to…
The Cato Institute's newest book, Gold, the Real Bills Doctrine, and the Fed: Sources of Monetary Disorder, 1922–1938 is out now—and it's already getting rave reviews for challenging conventional wisdom on the Great Depression. In Gold, the Real Bills Doctrine, and the Fed, preeminent monetary historians Thomas…
Thanks to President's Trump's picks for prospective Fed Board nominees, the subject of gold price targeting (or a gold "price rule") is getting attention once again. The idea, which got a lot of attention back in the 1980s, after Arthur Laffer and other supply-siders, including Alan Reynolds,…