Some years ago I published a paper on the banking theory and policy views of the important twentieth-century economist Friedrich A. Hayek, entitled “Why Didn't Hayek Favor Laissez Faire in Banking?”[1] Very recently, working on a new paper on Hayek’s changing views of the gold standard, I…
This primer is supposed to introduce readers to the workings of the present U.S. monetary system. So it's only natural that it should take established monetary arrangements for granted, including an official, "fiat" dollar currency managed by the Federal Reserve System. And while I haven't hesitated to…
About a month ago, a Facebook post drew my attention to an attempt, by Casey Pender of Prague's CEVRO Institute, to test my thesis that free banking contributes to NGDP stability using statistical evidence from Canada, which had a relatively free banking system between 1867, the year of…
(Originally appeared November 12, 2014) This past weekend I took part in a Liberty Fund conference having as its main topic David Graeber's Debt: the First 5000 Years (Melville House, 2011), but also addressing parts of Felix Martin's Money: The Unauthorized Biography (Knopf, 2014). Although Martin is…
So far, throughout this primer, I've claimed that central banks have one overarching task to perform: their job, I said, is to "regulate the overall availability of liquid assets, and through it the general course of spending, prices, and employment, in the economies they oversee." I've also…