“The Lights Go Out in Lebanon as Financial Collapse Accelerates,” declared a recent headline in The Washington Post. The headline refers specifically to worsening power outages but more generally to Lebanon’s ongoing “economic implosion.” This breakdown is due in large part to chaos in Lebanon’s monetary and…
The French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, delivered a scathing rebuke to Libra, the Facebook-led digital currency initiative, in the Financial Times this morning. Coming on the heels of several U.S. companies' withdrawal from the initiative after they received threatening letters from Senators Sherrod Brown and Brian…
The Zimbabwe government is back to its old money-printing tricks. As demand for Zimbabwe dollars dwindles, the government has ramped up restrictions on the use of substitutes. Late last month, as reported by Bloomberg News, "Zimbabwe’s government gave the central bank powers to impose civil penalties to…
(Originally appeared November 27, 2014) Happy Thanksgiving to all of my fellow free bankers out there! Today is our biggest secular national holiday. Not everyone celebrates Christmas or Easter much less other national holidays like Memorial Day or Labor Day, but I don't know anyone who doesn't…
(This is the last of a three-part series.) In my first and second posts addressing a recent Bank of Canada Working Paper by Ben Fung, Scott Hendry, and Warren E. Weber, I argued that the paper exaggerates the shortcomings of Canada's 19th-century currency system, with its reliance…