Milton Friedman (1951, 1960) provided influential back-of-the-envelope estimates of the costs devoted to extracting gold under what he called a “strict” gold standard. I have criticized those estimates elsewhere (White 1999, pp. 42-48) for exaggerating the volume of gold reserves used by actual gold-standard economies, and thus…
At the risk of sounding like a broken record (well, OK–at the risk of continuing to sound like a broken record), I'd like to say a bit more about economists' tendency to get their monetary history wrong. In particular, I'd like to take aim at common myths…
A monetary standard is a set of institutions and rules governing the supply of money in an economy. These rules and institutions collectively constrain the production of money. Through its constraints on money creation, the standard indirectly acts on prices. A monetary standard may also affect the…
I really ought to know better by now than to complain about the "backing" theory of money–the view that the value of, not just some sorts of money, but money of any sort, depends on the assets commanded by the money's suppliers. I've never been able to…