Politics

In a recent Bloomberg column, former New York Fed President Bill Dudley echoes a conventional Fed narrative, contrasting Fed interest rate cycles…

Recently, an investment advisor and Bitcoin proponent tweeted the claim that “[f]or most of human history” the “[s]eparation of money and state…

Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released a new minority staff report…

In assessing the possibility that a severe downturn occurred at the end of WWII, I took issue with conventional wartime and postwar…

It was supposed to be a debacle. As the Second World War drew to a close, the nation’s leading economists feared that,…

Thanks to the Roosevelt Recession, in the spring of 1938 the New Deal’s “Keynesians” finally found themselves in the saddle, displacing the…

Today, inflation has reached a 40-year high, in response to fiscal profligacy and accommodative monetary policy.  Direct cash payments to individuals and…

(From the entry on “Money,” by Charles Francis Bastable, in the famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica): The very large number…

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…

(Although my contributions to this series have so far been more-or-less in their proper order, this one isn’t:  it occurred to me…