It was supposed to be a debacle. As the Second World War drew to a close, the nation's leading economists feared that, once the armed services demobilized, at least 8 million men and women, perhaps many more, would be unemployed. That meant an unemployment rate of 12…
Thanks to the Roosevelt Recession, in the spring of 1938 the New Deal's "Keynesians" finally found themselves in the saddle, displacing the planners, reformers, and trust-busters whose legislative efforts had petered out some months before. The Keynesians' rise was symbolized by the $3 billion spending program FDR…
Today, inflation has reached a 40-year high, in response to fiscal profligacy and accommodative monetary policy. Direct cash payments to individuals and businesses in 2020 and 2021, which totaled more than $5 trillion, along with the rapid growth of base money—under the Fed’s large-scale asset purchase program…
(From the entry on "Money," by Charles Francis Bastable, in the famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica): The very large number of the autonomous cities of Greece, which possessed the right of issuing money, was the cause of the competition between different currencies, each having legal…
Although I've devoted many essays here to exploding myths about historical private currencies, there's one I've yet to directly challenge. That's the belief that such currencies only thrive in the absence of official alternatives. Otherwise, the argument goes, people would drop private currencies like so many hot…