The distinguished contributors to Populism and the Future of the Fed examine populist demands to expand the Fed’s mandate and the threat to the demarcation between fiscal and monetary policy. All the essays, except those by Charles Plosser and me, stem from Cato’s 39th Annual Monetary Conference,…
Every hoary myth about the private market's unfitness to supply means of exchange has roots that trace back to the hoariest monetary platitude of all, namely, the claim that governments alone, whether republican or absolutist or otherwise, are fit to coin money. That commonplace credendum dates from…
Relax: the Fed isn't about to catch fire or melt. This isn't about that sort of warming. It's about a different, more benign sort of Fed warming that my pals at the Mercatus Center claim to have discerned. Still, I don't believe them. Call me a Fed…
I don't think of myself as an especially lucky fellow. I've never bought a lottery ticket, or wagered more than a few bucks at a time (and that only in my impetuous youth) on horses, slots, or roulette. So far as I'm concerned, I can no more…
On November 12th I wrote a longish post explaining how growth fluctuations in two of the Federal Reserve's less-familiar liabilities—the foreign repo pool (FRP) and the Treasury General Account (TGA)—had contributed to a shortage of bank reserves that in turn caused repo rates to spike. I followed…