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Riverboat Gambling with Ben Bernanke
How one might think about the biggest SIFI of them all. Ben Bernanke’s 2012 lectures on central banking as he has studied and practiced it, now published as The Federal Reserve and the Financial...
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Mugged by Uncertainty: What Can Alan Greenspan Still Teach Us?
The so-called “Great Moderation,” for which our fiat-currency central bankers gave themselves so much credit, turned out to be the Era of Great Bubbles. The U.S., in successive decades, had the Tech...
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Wanted: A Sound Money Congress to Discipline an Inflationary Fed
The February 11 testimony of Janet Yellen, the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, to the House Financial Services Committee, described the Fed as “transparent and accountable.” However dubious...
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Simple Banking Rules for a Complex World
The Bankers’ New Clothes is a book much longer than it needs to be, which expresses several simple ideas, some right, some wrong, which would have made a very interesting and provocative article. Its...
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The Marriage of Governments and Banks—For Better or for Worse
Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber, combining their scholarly command of banking and political institutions, have published a book full of fertile ideas, instructive histories of the evolution of a...
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Is the Federal Reserve a Philosopher King?
A conference was held at the American Enterprise Institute on March 20, 2014 on the question: Is the Federal Reserve a philosopher king or servant of the treasury? Alex Pollock, a frequent contributor...
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The Financial Crisis as Soap Opera
When government financial officers, like Treasury Secretaries and Fed Chairmen, stand at the edge of the cliff of a market panic and stare down into the abyss of potential financial chaos, they always...
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A Cheer or a Bronx Cheer for the Fed?
In the financial crisis of 2007 through 2009, the Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet to finance the bust, just as intended by its legislative fathers of a century ago. They did not, of course,...
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Can a Crash Cure Itself?
How much do you know about the inflationary financing, in which the then-new Federal Reserve led the parade, that backed America’s participation in World War I? How about the high-inflation postwar...
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Martin Wolf’s Childlike Regulatory Faith
Martin Wolf’s The Shifts and the Shocks—What We’ve Learned—and Have Still to Learn—from the Financial Crisis is a long book. Even for those of us fascinated by financial cycles and crises, it takes...
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Should the Federal Reserve Be Free of Supervision While It Carries Out Vast...
The “Audit the Fed” proposal of Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) elicits a surprising amount of emotion, from opponents and supporters alike. Why should this be? “Monetary policy” purposefully sounds...
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The Central Bank of Switzerland Announces a Huge Loss: Would the Fed Ever Be...
The Swiss National Bank (SNB) has just announced an eye-popping net loss for the first quarter of 2015: 30 billion Swiss francs, or $32 billion[1]. A participant in its recent shareholders meeting...
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Hayek for Everybody
Donald Boudreaux has done us the favor of writing a popularized primer on the foundational thought of the great economist, Friedrich Hayek. His timing is good. For sadly, as Vaclav Klaus, the...
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A Balanced View of Human Limitations
In Can Financial Markets Be Controlled?, Howard Davies demonstrates his long experience in, and careful thinking about, the instabilities of financial systems. Possible reforms are weighed sensibly and...
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Solving a Problem Like Puerto Rico
Editor’s Note: The following is Alex Pollock’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the subject of Puerto Rico’s fiscal problems, delivered December 1, 2015. Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member...
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The Courage to Gamble
Ben Bernanke’s new book, The Courage to Act, demonstrates throughout its 579 pages the fundamental uncertainty faced by central bankers, Treasury officers, and everybody else when dealing with...
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Searching for Loyalty and Prudence
In his provocative and knowledgeable new book, Other People’s Money: The Real Business of Finance, John Kay considers the complex ways that financial systems operate in between the real savers, on one...
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Risk Doesn’t Stand Still
Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe explores the movement and transformation of risks in adapting, self-referencing systems, of which financial systems are a notable...
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Puerto Rico: A Big Default—What Next?
Rexford Tugwell, sometimes known as “Rex the Red” for his admiration of the 1930s Soviet Union and his fervent belief in central planning, was made Governor of Puerto Rico by President Franklin...
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Power, Independence, and Guessing
The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve is an informative and provocative history of the Fed and its remarkable evolution over a hundred years’ time: a complex institution, in a complex and...
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