A stable inflation rate is no guarantee of overall economic stability.
George Selgin
George Selgin is a Professor of Economics at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business. He is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. His writings also appear on www.freebanking.org. His research covers a broad range of topics within the field of monetary economics, including monetary history, macroeconomic theory, and the history of monetary thought. He is the author of The Theory of Free Banking, Bank Deregulation and Monetary Order, and several other books. He holds a B.A. in economics and zoology from Drew University, and a Ph.D. in economics from New York University.
Has the Fed been Holding Down Interest Rates?
Free banking money guru George Selgin opines.
Money and Banking Under Laissez-Faire Capitalism
This talk examines the development, operation and performance of monetary systems in the absence of government intervention.
Monopoly Money: The Destabilizing Consequences of Central Banking
How currency monopolies promote booms and busts, and having a lender of last resort leads to moral hazard and financial instability.
A Monetary Policy Primer, Part 7: Monetary Control, Then
“Monetary control” refers to the various procedures and devices the Fed and other central banks employ in their attempts to regulate the overall availability of liquid assets, and through it the general course of spending, prices, and employment, in the economies they o…
Reforming Last-Resort Lending: The Flexible Open Market Alternative
I regard any need for last-resort lending as reflecting, not the inherent shortcomings of private financial markets, but the debilitating effects of misguided regulatory interference with the free development of those markets.
The Election’s Bearing on Monetary Freedom
The sad reality is that the battle for monetary freedom has for some time now taken the form of a rearguard action, aimed at resisting as much as possible ever-increasing government incursions into an ever-shrinking realm of financial choice.
The Perils of Financial Over-Regulation
Financial systems, like economies generally, are organic entities. They must be allowed to flourish in a natural way.
Free Banking and the Federal Reserve
The record of past “free banking” systems, in which paper currency consisted of competitively supplied banknotes, contradicts the widespread belief that central banks play an essential part in promoting financial stability. Instead, both that record and...
A Monetary Policy Primer, Part 6: The Reserve-Deposit Multiplier
The multiplier’s significance to monetary policy is, or used to be, straightforward: it indicated the quantity of additional bank deposits that monetary authorities could expect to see banks produce in response to any increment of new bank reserves supplied them by mean…
The Myth of the Myth of Barter
There is, after all, at least one impulse among humans that’s more deep-seated than their “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.” I mean, of course, their propensity to let themselves be thoroughly bamboozled.
On Free Banking, Monetary Rules, and Crusades
Free banking and monetary rules were rival ideas for guarding against abuses of discretionary monetary policy, today they are properly seen as complementary schemes, one for improving the performance of the banking system, the other for reforming the base-money regime. …
A Monetary Policy Primer, Part 5: The Supply of Money
On the Fed’s “instruments of monetary control,” which include devices for regulating the total quantity of bank reserves and circulating Federal Reserve notes, and also for regulating the quantity of bank deposits and other forms of privately-created money that will be …
A Monetary Policy Primer, Part 4: Stable Prices or Stable Spending?
A better alternative, if only it can somehow be achieved, or at least approximated, is a monetary system that adjusts the stock of money in response to changes in the demand for money balances, thereby reducing the need for changes in the general level of prices.
A Monetary Policy Primer, Part 3: The Price Level
What sort of monetary policy or regime best avoids the costs of having too much or too little money?
A Monetary Policy Primer, Part 2: The Demand for Money
How can a central bank manage a quantity without being certain just how to define, let alone measure, that quantity? How is it possible for the quantity of money supplied to differ from the quantity demanded? When those things do differ, how can one tell? Finally, ju…
A Monetary Policy Primer, Part 1: Money
What, exactly, is “monetary policy” about? Why is there such a thing at all? What should we want to accomplish by it — and what should we not try to accomplish?
The State and 100 Percent Reserve Banking
Free bankers have been fighting a war on two fronts. On one they face champions of central banking and managed money. On the other they struggle against advocates of 100-percent reserve banking. Although the second front is a lot smaller than the first, it’s far fr…
Ten Things Every Economist Should Know about the Gold Standard
The gold standard was hardly perfect, and gold bugs themselves sometimes make silly claims about their favorite former monetary standard. But these things don’t excuse the errors many economists commit in their eagerness to find fault with that “barbarous relic.”
The Sad Model of a Modern Monetary Economist
It isn’t clear that the Fed has brought any substantial improvement in macroeconomic stability.
Robert Samuelson’s Folly of Fed Obeisance
The Fed is a large and aloof agency that needs to be tamed.
A 1920-21 Recovery Myth
The U.S. was able to recover relatively quickly from at least one deep slump despite authorities’ refusal to resort to either fiscal or monetary stimulus.
Free Banking and The Dollar
While I’m all for monetary freedom and competition, I’m also for reforming the U.S. dollar, which for me means freeing it from control by discretionary central bankers.
We Are All Free Banking Theorists Now*
If even economists who’ve never heard of free banking, or who dismiss both it and the people who take it seriously, nevertheless subscribe to some free banking theories of their own, where do their theories come from?
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