"This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. …[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself." — FDR, in his first inaugural address. "There is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain."—Thomas Hobbes, on […]

In his first speech as a member of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, Christopher Waller defended Fed independence and reassured his audience that "deficit financing and debt servicing issues play no role in our policy decisions and never will." His goal was to dispel […]

Alerted by a tweet by him, I recently listened to a December 2020 C-SPAN talk, on "Paper Money in Antebellum America," by historian Joshua Greenberg, the author of Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic. I haven't yet read […]

Every hoary myth about the private market's unfitness to supply means of exchange has roots that trace back to the hoariest monetary platitude of all, namely, the claim that governments alone, whether republican or absolutist or otherwise, are fit to coin money. That commonplace credendum […]

ThePrivateMintInEconomics_LawrenceHWhite_CMFAWP003 Original Article

Regular readers of Alt-M don't need to be told that yours truly is no fan of the Fed's gigantic credit footprint. Even before the recent crisis, he lamented both the extent to which the Fed had switched from regulating this nation's short-term money market to […]

"Massive jolts of New Deal spending had stopped the economic slide, [but the economy crashed again when] over two years, FDR slashed government spending 17 percent." (From a 2011 NPR presentation.) In the last installment of this series, I discussed the hypothesis that the 1937 […]

COVIDCash_KennethRogoffAndJessicaScazzero_CMFAWP002 Original Article

By the start of 1937, things were looking up for the U.S. economy. Although the Supreme Court had struck down both the NIRA and the AAA—the chief pillars of the original New Deal's recovery plan—some time ago, like a glider released by its tow plane, […]

Having devoted the last two posts in my New Deal series to the NRA, I may have given readers the impression that I had nothing to say about the consequences of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) passed more than a month before the National Recovery […]