What Are the True Financial Risks of the Facebook-Led Digital Currency? (Part I: Systemic Risk) In medicine, “zebra” describes an instance when the doctor diagnoses an unlikely but eye-catching condition instead of a less noteworthy but more probable one that also fits the symptoms. Professor Theodore Woodward…
Twice recently I've come across arguments to the effect that, despite what some libertarians, goldbugs, cryptocurrency fans, and Fed Board candidates imagine, the idea that the historical gold standard kept governments from managing money, leaving the job to market forces, is a myth. In his June 24th…
An interesting debate has arisen in Ecuador during recent weeks over the following proposition advanced by authors at a Quito think tank: a dollarized country shouldn’t reduce its tariffs when the dollar is overvalued relative to the currencies of its regional trading partners (according to purchasing-power-parity measures)…
By now everyone has heard of Libra, the new private digital money system announced last week, sponsored by Facebook and a consortium of other firms, to be rolled out in 2020. The project’s official white paper, “An Introduction to Libra,” calls it “a new decentralized blockchain, a…
Earlier this month I was lucky enough to attend the Federal Reserve's much-anticipated conference on "Monetary Policy Strategy, Tools, and Communication Practices." This was the "research" component of a series of Fed Listens events kicked off this February and wrapped-up last week. The aim of the series…