Editor’s Pick

On October 10th, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, sharing it with Ben Bernanke "for research on banks and financial crises.” According to the prize committee, Diamond and Dybvig's research showed how the combination

By the start of 1948, there could no longer be any doubt: the Great Depression wasn't coming back. Instead of collapsing at war's end, as many feared it would, combined government and private spending (as measured by nominal Gross Domestic

In a recent Bloomberg column, former New York Fed President Bill Dudley echoes a conventional Fed narrative, contrasting Fed interest rate cycles under two supposedly distinct Chairmen. “Powell will need to find a way to persuade [markets] that he has no

Recently, an investment advisor and Bitcoin proponent tweeted the claim that “[f]or most of human history” the “[s]eparation of money and state was the norm, even if the state stamped their ruler's face on the coin.” Some strong disagreement (and

Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released a new minority staff report on July 26 contending that, for more than a decade, China has made “a sustained effort . .

In assessing the possibility that a severe downturn occurred at the end of WWII, I took issue with conventional wartime and postwar output statistics, while taking the period's unemployment statistics at face value. In so doing I set aside a

It was supposed to be a debacle. As the Second World War drew to a close, the nation's leading economists feared that, once the armed services demobilized, at least 8 million men and women, perhaps many more, would be unemployed. That

Thanks to the Roosevelt Recession, in the spring of 1938 the New Deal's "Keynesians" finally found themselves in the saddle, displacing the planners, reformers, and trust-busters whose legislative efforts had already run out of steam some months before. The Keynesians'

Today, inflation has reached a 40-year high, in response to fiscal profligacy and accommodative monetary policy.  Direct cash payments to individuals and businesses in 2020 and 2021, which totaled more than $5 trillion, along with the rapid growth of base

(From the entry on "Money," by Charles Francis Bastable, in the famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica): The very large number of the autonomous cities of Greece, which possessed the right of issuing money, was the cause of the