Several times on these pages (e.g., here and here), and elsewhere (e.g., here and here) I've tried to refute the claim, championed by certain Austrian-school economists and their many fans, that fractional-reserve banking is inherently fraudulent, because whenever the sum of readily-redeemable bank deposit balances and (when…
Having spent the last month or so poring over writings on last-resort lending,* and especially writings dealing with the recent crisis and its aftermath, with the particular aim of discovering the best means for supplying last-resort credit when it's called for, and for not supplying it when…
So says I, in commenting on Amar Bhidé's ill-informed opinion piece in yesterday's FT. Here, with some minor edits (which I failed to fix on time in the original), is what I wrote: Were Mr. Bhidé's own suggestions for monetary policy reforms sound, his swipe at fundamental criticisms…
In previous installments of this primer I've tried to convince you, first, that monetary policy is ultimately about keeping the available quantity of money from differing substantially, if only temporarily, from the quantity demanded and, second, that doing this boils down in practice to having a money…
It occurs to me that, despite the unprecedented flood of writings of all sorts — books, blog-posts, newspaper op-eds, and academic journal articles — addressing just about every monetary policy development during and since the 2008 financial crisis, relatively few attempts have been made to step back…