Editor’s Pick

On Thursday, lawyers from the Department of Justice asked a judge to reject a request from Jack Smith, a suspect in the January 6 Capitol attack, for a narrow gag order. Smith’s counsel had requested the order to avoid having their

Ralph Nader has recently come forward with his views on the 2020 presidential election and President Donald Trump's recent proposals to help Joe Biden win. Nader, a consumer advocate and former candidate for president, has warned against trusting the President's

Of the many steps taken to combat the depression during the Roosevelt administration's famous first hundred days, none was more significant than the passage of the June 16, 1933 Banking Act providing for the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance

(This is the last installment of a three-part essay. The other parts are here and here.) A Capital Bank As its title suggests, the best-known history of the RFC, James Stuart Olson's (1982) Saving Capitalism: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the New

(This is the second installment of a three-part essay. The first part is here.) Big Engines that Couldn't Although Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) was "more largely a banker's loan bank than anything else" (Ebersole 1933, 477), financial institutions were never the

(In writing this series, I allowed myself to skip over some topics. But now that I'm turning the series into a book, to be published by the University of Chicago Press, I have to close those gaps. The most important

What finally brought the Great Depression to an end? We've seen that, whatever it was, it took place not during the 30s but sometime between then and the end of World War II when a remarkable postwar revival occurred instead

After an interruption due mostly to my move to Spain, I'm pleased to be back in the saddle again, wrapping up my series on the New Deal. I ended a previous installment of this series by observing that, despite many dire

My last post argued that, despite what Diamond and Dybvig's famous theory suggests, bank runs have seldom proven fatal to otherwise sound banks. Instead, when people run on a bank, it's usually because it's already in hot water. In response to

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Economics is to be shared by Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond, and Philip H. Dybvig, “for research on banks and financial crises.” Diamond and Dybvig are best known for their 1983 article, “Bank Runs, Deposit