The Menace of Fiscal Inflation
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 money—under the Fed’s large-scale asset purchase program (also known as quantitative easing or QE)—-have combined […]
Read More →Monetary Progress
(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 competition between different currencies, each having legal tender power only within its own city. In […]
Read More →Paul Krugman and the “Ersatz” Theory of Private Currencies
Although I’ve devoted many essays here to exploding myths about historical private currencies, there’s one I’ve yet to directly challenge. That’s the belief that such currencies only thrive in the absence of official alternatives. Otherwise, the argument goes, people would drop private currencies like so many hot rocks. Since this opinion assumes that private currencies […]
Read More →The New Deal and Recovery, Part 18: The Recovery So Far
(Although my contributions to this series have so far been more-or-less in their proper order, this one isn’t: it occurred to me only relatively recently that it would be worthwhile to take stock of the overall progress of the recovery up to the outbreak of the Roosevelt Revolution before delving into that episode. Had I […]
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