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…
Last weekend the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City hosted its annual symposium in Jackson Hole. Despite being the Fed’s largest annual event, the symposium has been “fairly boring” for years, in terms of what can be learned about the future of actual policy. This year’s program,…