Of many interesting things said during Cato's 36th Monetary Conference, one in particular tempted me to rush to the podium to give its author a big hug. The speaker, Joe Gagnon of the Peterson Institute, was calling into question the now-conventional wisdom that, to avoid interfering with…
Having considered, in two previous essays, the origins, legality, and adverse consequences of the Scottish bank suspension, we're now ready to ask whether, and in what ways, that episode compels us to reconsider the virtues of free banking, both as practiced in Scotland and in general. If…
Last week, I had the pleasure of addressing the Michigan Credit Union Economic Summit on the future of financial services. I discussed emergent themes in financial regulation as a result of new technologies, and their implications for the industry. Here are my remarks — I hope you…
The Fall 2018 edition of the Cato Journal, an interdisciplinary journal of public policy, is now available online. In this latest issue, CJ editor and founder (and Cato VP of monetary studies) James Dorn includes two articles and two book reviews on financial regulation and monetary policy…
[Having drawn attention in my last post to Fritz Machlup's superb 1940 book, The Stock Market, Credit, and Capital Accumulation, it occurred to me that excerpts from that work concerning the circumstances in which an increase in the supply of "fiduciary" bank credit will not promote an…