Lately the old-timers here at Cato's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives — which is to say, Jim Dorn and I — have been talking a lot about the Phillips Curve, which seems to be playing a part in monetary policy discussions today almost as big as…
As regular Alt-M readers know, I've been saying for over a year now that, despite their promise to "normalize" monetary policy, Fed officials have been determined to maintain the Fed's post-crisis "floor" system of monetary control, in which changes to the Fed's monetary policy stance are mainly…
Recently David Beckworth and Martin Sandbu, among others, have drawn attention to an interesting paper by James Bullard and Riccardo DiCecio unveiled in Norway earlier this year. In it, Bullard and DiCecio investigate a model economy possessing both a large private credit market and "Non-state contingent nominal…
As The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and several other news outlets reported recently, although it has managed to avoid setting off another taper tantrum like that of 2013, the Fed is having a bad case of unwind jitters, thanks to unanticipated tightening in the…
[I'm pleased to introduce with this entry a new Alt-M series, consisting of occasional classic essays or excerpts from longer works concerning alternative monetary arrangements. As a fitting introduction to the series I've chosen the passages on currency from chapter 29 of Herbert Spencer's earliest and most…