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…
Thomas Philippon's The Great Reversal is an important book in which he warns of the decline of competition in many U.S. product markets. Not having studied antitrust issues for some time, I will leave criticism of his general thesis—that competition has indeed declined and that this is…
The Fall 2019 edition of the Cato Journal, the Cato Institute's interdisciplinary journal of public policy, is now available online. Readers of Alt-M will find the articles on monetary and financial topics of special interest. Their topics range from financial inclusion, to macroprudential policy, to Modern Monetary…
How should central bankers provide aid to struggling financial institutions during a panic? Ask 19th-century economic theorist Walter Bagehot. Or, if you can't do that, ask his biographer: acclaimed author, publisher, and monetary scholar James Grant. Join Grant and the Cato Institute's George Selgin on Wednesday, September…
The Cato Institute's newest book, Gold, the Real Bills Doctrine, and the Fed: Sources of Monetary Disorder, 1922–1938 is out now—and it's already getting rave reviews for challenging conventional wisdom on the Great Depression. In Gold, the Real Bills Doctrine, and the Fed, preeminent monetary historians Thomas…