"Roosevelt had conducted an active monetary and fiscal program of recovery…working along lines suggested by Keynes." Eric Rauchway, The Money Makers, p. xvi. As we saw in the last installment to this series, New Deal fiscal policies did little to help the U.S. economy recover from the…
"[The COVID-19 crisis] wouldn't be the first time America has resorted to large-scale fiscal stimulus in a peacetime emergency. The New Deal of the 1930s, a response to the Great Depression, is probably the most far-reaching example." (Katia Dmitrieva, "The Times America Went Big and Flooded Economy…
"It is difficult to think of an important aspect of the New Deal to which Roosevelt had not plainly pledged himself before taking office. …Roosevelt had campaigned on a clear and specific New Deal Program." (Eric Rauchway, Winter War, pp. 15-17.) To understand the New Deal's shortcomings…
Cato's Annual Monetary Conference last November hosted a "shadow review" of the Federal Reserve's own self-review, dedicated to examining "whether the U.S. monetary policy framework can be improved to meet future challenges." The articles in the spring/summer 2020 issue of the Cato Journal, drawn from that conference,…
Proposals for "central bank digital currency" (CBDC) come in two basic types: account-based and token-based. I have been critical of proposals for an account-based system. Until recently, there didn't seem to be much active interest in a token-based system. But now comes a significant token-based proposal in…