As highlighted by David Henderson and Peter Boettke, markets and competition are like weeds, not delicate flowers. Economies recover even from severe boom-bust episodes and despite growth-retarding regime uncertainty. Even burdensome regulation, per Pierre Lemieux, causes a “slow-motion collapse” or stagnation, not a crash.
Throughout the existence of the Fed, its officers and intellectual supporters understandably asserted that the government’s movement toward central banking was a most beneficial evolution. In a 1948 issue of The Federal Reserve Bulletin, for example, Fed Chairman Thomas B. McCabe asserted that money production could not manage itself, so we need a central bank such as the Fed that acts for the public interest.
[This article is excerpted from the December issue of The Free Market, and is adapted from the fifth chapter of 2014’s The Fed at One Hundred, edited by David Howden and Joseph Salerno.]
Nicolas Cachanosky has recently released a very timely and well thought out working paper, “NGDP targeting: is five percent too much?” which should be of interest to all those serious about improving the performance monetary institutions or at least in limiting the harm central control of money unleashes on economic activity. The abstract:
North Carolina recently offered Boeing $683 million in tax incentives to open a plant in North Carolina to build Boeing’s new 777X jetliner. The NC bid failed, as did those from some other states, when Boeing decided to build the 777X in its home state of Washington where there is no state, personal, or corporate income tax.
EcPoFi recaps last year’s development of the True Money Supply (TMS), a monetary aggregate developed by Murray Rothbard and myself in the 1980s.
Legal recreational cannabis/marijuana/pot is almost one year old in Colorado. The Denver Business Journal recently published a retrospective containing several articles reviewing the experience. The general conclusion is that it has been a big success, not the tragedy some had predicted or claimed.
