I’ve begun working on a new book on the gold standard. In the first chapter I plan to discuss the origin of money, as a preliminary to discussing how silver and gold became the world’s dominant commodity monies. The topic of the origin of money has become…
Kenneth S. Rogoff stands out as the advocate of restricting hand-to-hand currency who has argued the case most comprehensively and probably the most cautiously. I critically reviewed his recent book, The Curse of Cash, in the May 2017 issue of Econ Journal Watch. Here I summarize highlights…
Every time I say something nice about monetary rules, as I did in my last post here, some Alt-M readers wonder why I'm doing that instead of championing free banking and choice in currencies. Have I given up my former views concerning the merits of these alternatives?…
The Cato Institute recently released Monetary Alternatives: Rethinking Government Fiat Money, a collection of essays 30 years in the making. As George Selgin explains in the foreword, The complacency wrought by the Great Moderation, not to mention the limited interest in fundamental monetary reform before then, resulted…
News accounts and analyses on other blogs have usefully described and critically assessed the “demonetization” shock that Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave the Indian economy on November 8. Here we emphasize two features of Modi’s initiative that have been little noticed. First, the combination of demonetization followed…