In my last post I wrote about the lawsuit TNB USA Inc has filed against the New York Fed, which has refused to grant the would-be bank a Master Account. I argued that, despite its name (TNB stands for "The Narrow Bank"), and despite what some commentators…
Dedicated Alt-M readers may recall my having reported here several years ago the suit filed by Colorado's Four Corner's Credit Union against the Kansas City Fed — after the Fed refused it a Master Account on the grounds that it planned to cater to Colorado's marijuana-related businesses….
The Italian general elections of March 4, 2018 have produced an improbable coalition government between two upstart populist parties: left-Eurosceptic-nationalist Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement) and the right-Eurosceptic-nationalist Lega (League). The coalition partners agree on greater public spending and, at the same time, on tax cuts…
The environmental impact of cryptocurrencies looms large among the many concerns voiced by sceptics. Earlier this year, Agustín Carstens, who runs the influential Bank for International Settlements, called Bitcoin “a combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster.” Carstens’ first two indictments have been…
[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…