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What Is Free Banking All About?
I notice that there has been a bit of a dustup lately about free banking, triggered by two posts by Izabella Kaminska, first on FTAlphaville followed by another on her own blog. I don’t want to get too...
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The Nearly Forgotten Dearly Beloved 1920-21 Depression Yet Again; Or, Never...
The industrious James Grant recently published a book about the 1920-21 Depression. It has received enthusiastic reviews in the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s, was the subject of an admiring column...
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Exposed: Milton Friedman’s Cluelessness about the Insane Bank of France
About a month ago, I started a series of posts about monetary policy in the 1920s, (about the Bank of France, Benjamin Strong, the difference between a gold-exchange standard and a gold standard, and...
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Larry White on the Gold Standard and Me
A little over three months ago on a brutally hot day in Washington DC, I gave a talk about a not yet completed paper at the Mercatus Center Conference on Monetary Rules for a Post-Crisis World. The...
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Samuelson Rules the Seas
I think Nick Rowe is a great economist; I really do. And on top of that, he recently has shown himself to be a very brave economist, fearlessly claiming to have shown that Paul Samuelson’s classic 1980...
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What’s Wrong with the Price-Specie-Flow Mechanism? Part I
The tortured intellectual history of the price-specie-flow mechanism (PSFM), which received its classic exposition in an essay (“Of the Balance of Trade”) by David Hume about 275 years ago is not a...
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What’s Wrong with the Price-Specie-Flow Mechanism, Part II: Friedman and...
Having explained in my previous post why the price-specie-flow mechanism (PSFM) is a deeply flawed mischaracterization of how the gold standard operated, I am now going to discuss two important papers...
View ArticleMilton Friedman and How not to Think about the Gold Standard, France,...
Last week I listened to David Beckworth on his excellent podcast Macro Musings, interviewing Douglas Irwin. I don’t think I’ve ever met Doug, but we’ve been in touch a number of times via email. Doug...
View ArticleWhite and Hogan on Hayek and Cassel on the Causes of the Great Depression
Lawrence White and Thomas Hogan have just published a new paper in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (“Hayek, Cassel, and the origins of the great depression”). Since White is a leading...
View ArticleOn the Price Specie Flow Mechanism
I have been working on a paper tentatively titled “The Smithian and Humean Traditions in Monetary Theory.” One section of the paper is on the price-specie-flow mechanism, about which I wrote last month...
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