A recent article in Econ Journal Watch surveying the favorite dead and living economists of 299 respondents caught my eye. It is also tangentially relevant to Brad's question about the free banking classics. As you would have expected, Adam Smith was the respondents' favorite economist before the…
My Free Banking posts will not be focused on the monetary policy aspects of 'free banking,' but rather on the other aspects of what I would call a 'free-er banking' environment going forward. I plan to focus not only on these non-monetary policy activities of central banks, but also…
In the internet boom of the 1990s, there was a rush of new alternative payment systems or currencies (Paypal being the most successful). Forbes even ran a great cover story on this issue Politics for the Really Cool. For whatever combination of reasons (the tech being too…
Happy days are, make that, stagflation is here again. So says Ronald McKinnon in a Wall Street Journal column. Stagflation was memorialized by the 1970s experience of high inflation and economic stagnation. The Stanford professor says it's rearing its ugly head again. He lays out the cause:…
Brad asked about the free banking book classics. What I had already planned to write, below, partly answers his question. Current thinking about free banking began with Friedrich Hayek's 1976 pamphlet Denationalisation of Money (link is to an expanded version first issued in 1978 and reprinted in…