The Cato Institute recently released Monetary Alternatives: Rethinking Government Fiat Money, a collection of essays 30 years in the making. As George Selgin explains in the foreword, The complacency wrought by the Great Moderation, not to mention the limited interest in fundamental monetary reform before then, resulted…
The Cato Institute recently released the 8th edition of its Handbook for Policymakers. Compiled by Cato scholars, it provides advice for the new administration and Congress on key domestic and foreign policy issues. The CMFA's George Selgin, Thaya Brook Knight, and Mark Calabria (now Chief Economist to…
Monetarism is often misunderstood, overlooked, forgotten, or even derided. Yet its basic logic, resting on the quantity theory of money, is evident and remains important in a world of pure fiat monies. Most major central banks have abandoned monetary targeting in favor of setting interest rates to…
Sebastian Mallaby's biography of Alan Greenspan does just about everything right. Despite its length, it's eminently readable. Yet there's nothing superficial about it: Mallaby seems no less comfortable with economics than he is with English, allowing expert monetary and macro-economists to join non-expert readers in both enjoying and…
Recently, the UK Daily Telegraph ran a remarkable Op-Ed written by William Hague, the just-retired Conservative politician and former UK Foreign Secretary. The title alone was startling: "Central bankers have collectively lost the plot. They must raise interest rates or face their doom." Now I confess that…