On October 10th, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, sharing it with Ben Bernanke "for research on banks and financial crises.” According to the prize committee, Diamond and Dybvig's research showed how the combination of borrowing short and lending long…
(As many Alt-M readers will know, my interest in Bitcoin goes back to its earliest days, and even before that: like my grad school mentor and regular Alt-M contributor Lawrence White, I took part in the 1990's "cypherpunk" movement that prefigured Bitcoin's development. Not quite two years…
Building a bridge is costly: It takes labor and machinery and raw materials that have alternative uses. Does it follow that building it is a waste? No. Waste occurs when the cost incurred exceeds the benefit attained. Cost greater than zero does not imply cost greater than…
The answer depends on what you mean. Succeeded at what? With the US dollar price of Bitcoin reaching an all-time high above $23,000 this month, and its market cap reaching an all-time high above $400 billion, there has been much celebration among Bitcoin holders about their success…
Just over 150 miles separate the Swiss cities of Basel and Geneva. For ten months, their distance has symbolized the gulf between the international regulators of the Financial Stability Board and the Libra Association, a corporate payments consortium led by Facebook. But this week marked a rapprochement,…