(From the entry on "Money," by Charles Francis Bastable, in the famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica): The very large number of the autonomous cities of Greece, which possessed the right of issuing money, was the cause of the competition between different currencies, each having legal…
Although I've devoted many essays here to exploding myths about historical private currencies, there's one I've yet to directly challenge. That's the belief that such currencies only thrive in the absence of official alternatives. Otherwise, the argument goes, people would drop private currencies like so many hot…
A couple months ago, in arguing that “The Fed should give everyone a bank account,” journalist Matt Yglesias cited what he took to be an instructive precedent: “Once upon a time, governments didn’t issue paper currency, and instead banknotes were printed privately by banks. But over time,…
Alerted by a tweet by him, I recently listened to a December 2020 C-SPAN talk, on "Paper Money in Antebellum America," by historian Joshua Greenberg, the author of Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic. I haven't yet read his book….
Every hoary myth about the private market's unfitness to supply means of exchange has roots that trace back to the hoariest monetary platitude of all, namely, the claim that governments alone, whether republican or absolutist or otherwise, are fit to coin money. That commonplace credendum dates from…