Friedman, Schuler and Hanke on exchange rates – a minor and friendly disagreement

Before Arthur Laffer got me very upset on Monday I had read an excellent piece by Kurt Schuler on Freebanking.org about Milton Friedman’s position on floating exchange rates versus fixed exchange rates. Kurt kindly refers to my post on differences between the Swedish and Danish exchange regimes in which I argue that even though Milton […]

Atlas Sound Money Project Interview with George Selgin

See this new excellent interview with George Selgin. I think it is harder to find any bigger expert on Free Banking theory and Free Banking history than George. Great stuff – even though I do not agree with everything (yes, believe it of not – I do not agree with everything George is saying). George […]

Is Market Monetarism just market socialism?

The short answer to the question in the headline is no, but I can understand if somebody would suspect so. I will discuss this below. If there had been an internet back in the 1920s then the leading Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek would have had their own blogs and so would […]

“Good E-money” can solve Zimbabwe’s ‘coin problem’

The New York Times reports on the Zimbabwe’s so-called “coin problem”: “When Zimbabweans say they are waiting for change, they are usually talking about politics. After all, the country has had the same leader since 1980. But these days, Robson Madzumbara spends a lot of time quite literally waiting around for change. Pocket change, that is. […]

Nixon was a crook and Arthur Burns was a failed central banker

Back from my trip to Riga and Stockholm and two books had arrived in the mail from Amazon. The first one “Inside The Nixon Administration – the Secret Diary of Arthur Burns 1969-1974” (Edited by Robert Ferrell, 2010). The second one is Larry White’s “Free Banking in Britain” (yes, dear readers believe it or not […]

Laos is facing an old-fashioned balance-of-payment crisis

I am writing this while I am vacationing with the family in Thailand. However, in a couple of weeks we will be heading to Laos where my wife has worked for a number of years. So I thought it would be interesting to write a small post on the economic situation in Laos and “luckily” […]

Googlenomics and the popularity of Bitcoin

Lasse Birk Olesen’s guest post about Bitcoin inspired me to do a bit of Googlenomics. I simply had a look at searches in Google for ‘Bitcoin’ using Google Insight. The “bubble” that Lasse talked about in 2011 is certainly also visible in google searches. Have a look on this graph. Since June 2011 the search activity […]

NGDP level targeting – the true Free Market alternative (we try again)

Most of the blogging Market Monetarists have their roots in a strong free market tradition and nearly all of us would probably describe ourselves as libertarians or classical liberal economists who believe that economic allocation is best left to market forces. Therefore most of us would also tend to agree with general free market positions […]

East African Monetary Union remains a very bad idea (I have a better idea)

This is from the Kenyan daily The Nation: East African Community leaders on Saturday signed the Monetary Union Protocol which is intended to result in a single currency in 10 years’ time. The signing ceremony held at Speke Resort Munyonyo in Uganda was witnessed by Members of the East Africa Legislative Assembly, diplomats and high […]

Selgin on Quasi-Commodity Money (Part 1)

George Selgin just send me his new paper on what he has termed Quasi-Commodity Money. George spoke briefly on this topic in his recent presentation at the Italian Free Market think tank the Bruno Leoni Institute. See my comment here on the presentation and my review on a related paper – “L Street – Selgin’s […]