Among many other advantages it enjoys when it comes to influencing the course of monetary reform, the Fed has that of being able to shift the constraints that determine whether a proposed reform is or isn't possible. If existing constraints don't stand in the way of some…
Last summer I contributed a post at Alt-M about the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR), a new regulation that is part of the latest international Basel Accords (Basel III) and that is being imposed on U.S. banks and other financial institutions. As I explained in that post, the…
In my last post in this series, I observed that an economy's "base" money serves as the "raw material" that commercial banks and other private-market financial intermediaries employ in "producing" deposits of various kinds that can themselves serve as means of exchange. If they could do so…
Over the last couple of decades, reserve requirements all but vanished as a means of bank regulation and monetary control. But now a new variation on reserve requirements is being introduced through the capital controls of the Basel Accords. Canada, the UK, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, and…