As we continue to span the globe to bring the constant variety of ESG topics, I’m reminded of my favorite part of watching live sports: being part of a crowd. The energy inside the stadium is never more electric than when something great happens for your team. At times like those—a walk-off home run or […]
Everyone is talking about inflation, but what is it? Why does it matter? What causes it? And what can the Federal Reserve do about it? This primer will address those questions with the goal of improving the public’s understanding of inflation and the role of the central bank. What Is Inflation? Inflation is best described […]
The comparison has by now been made so often that it may qualify as a platitude. I mean that between stablecoin issuers and “wildcat” banks, the fly-by-night scams that supposedly flooded the antebellum United States with notes nominally worth some stated amount of gold or silver, but actually worth little more than the rag paper […]
A “stablecoin” is a cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a fiat currency, gold, or another continuously traded asset. USD Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC), the two stablecoins with the largest values in circulation, are each managed to maintain a price centered on and close to $1.00 (usually within 1 cent). Both Tether and […]
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing! The post Hello world! appeared first on EPC Network.
“Why should we not let people use freely what money they want to use? [They] ought to have the right to decide whether they want to buy or sell for francs, pounds, dollars, D-marks, or ounces of gold. I have no objection to governments issuing money, but I believe their claim to a monopoly, or […]
TheGameStopEpisode_AllanMalz_CMFAWP005 The post The GameStop Episode: What Happened And What Does It Mean? (CMFA Working Paper No. 005) appeared first on Alt-M.
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, we came to see this as a worthwhile […]
(This editor’s note is cross-posted from the Spring/Summer 2021 edition of the Cato Journal.) In 1996, Cato held its 14th Annual Monetary Conference, “The Future of Money in the Information Age.” The proceedings, along with additional essays, appeared in a book with the same title in 1997. In that volume, Alan Greenspan wrote, “To develop […]
(This post completes my three-part discussion of the “regime uncertainty” hypothesis, according to which the New Deal hampered recovery by causing businessmen to fear policy changes that might render their investments unprofitable. Links to the previous posts about regime uncertainty, and to the other posts of my series on The New Deal and Recovery, occur […]