Monetary System

I ran across a post by Robert Murphy over at the Mises Institute blog on Modern Monetary Theory. Since I have been pushing the idea that the centrality of secular debt accumulation makes some ideas from MMT and Austrian Economics…

Banks are never constrained by reserves or reserve ratios. Banks are capital constrained. In our fiat money system, the central bank uses reserves in the system to help the Federal hit a target interest rate. So, the central bank provides…

Once politicians set policy and commit to it by signing it into existence, they would rather risk losing office than change course.

Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, "The evidence reviewed here shows not…

The latest figures from the US show that the consumer price index rose 0.5% in March, whilst the core personal consumption expenditure price index rose only 0.1%. This column explains the roles of these competing measures and argues that US…

We debated whether to call Section 3 "Devaluation & Transformation" or 'Transformation and Devaluation" because we could not be sure (or possibly know) which would be generally recognized first. We finally opted for "Devaluation and…

Is there a viable currency to replace the US dollar when over-leverage, economic imbalances and consequent money printing ultimately lead to an overwhelming decline in confidence in the dollar as a store of value?

The following is the second in a series of posts by QB Partners on the dollar standard monetary system. The first post is available for review at Credit Writedowns. In section 1, we tried to lend perspective to the current global monetary…

Below is a framework that delineates the ideology and economics of two groups of economic thought that are much talked about in the wake of the Credit Crisis: the Chartalists and the Austrians. These two groups are considered outside of the…

The global crisis has called into question how banks are run and how they should be regulated. Highly leveraged banks went under, threatening to drag down the entire financial system with them. Here, David Miles of the Bank of England’s…