"[The COVID-19 crisis] wouldn't be the first time America has resorted to large-scale fiscal stimulus in a peacetime emergency. The New Deal of the 1930s, a response to the Great Depression, is probably the most far-reaching example." (Katia Dmitrieva, "The Times America Went Big and Flooded Economy…
This morning, upon logging in to my Twitter account, I found it brimming with reports that the Hong Kong government was about to embark upon an unprecedented experiment with helicopter money. "Helicopter Money is Here," blurts an FT Alphaville headline. "Hong Kong Embraces Helicopter Money," says Zero…
Modern Monetary Theory has been accused, not always fairly, of more serious shortcomings than you can shake a stick at. Among other things, critics have faulted it for not being all that modern, for passing-off tautologies as profundities, for wrongly assuming that the value of fiat money…
Of many interesting things said during Cato's 36th Monetary Conference, one in particular tempted me to rush to the podium to give its author a big hug. The speaker, Joe Gagnon of the Peterson Institute, was calling into question the now-conventional wisdom that, to avoid interfering with…
A lot of ink was spilled last month over President Trump's criticism of the Fed raising interest rates. Observers worried that those criticisms meant the President was prepared to directly meddle with U.S. monetary policy. But so far, at least, there’s no evidence that any such meddling has…