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…
Back in July 2015 I reminded Alt-M readers of a paper I presented at the 2012 Mont Pelerin Society meetings in Prague, as part of a session in which Otmar Issing, one of the euro's architects, also took part. As I remarked in that last post, although Mr. Issing…
Between writing his well-known revolutionary liberal tracts Common Sense (1776) and The Rights of Man (1791), Thomas Paine contributed knowledgeably to a 1785-6 debate over money and banking in Pennsylvania. Paine defended the Bank of North America’s charter and its operations in a number of lengthy letters…