What can history tell us about the relationship between the banking system, financial crises, the global economy, and economic performance? Evidence shows that in the advanced economies we live in a world that is more financialized than ever before as measured by importance of credit in the...

The mandate of the Federal Reserve has evolved considerably over its hundred-year history. From an initial focus in 1913 on financial stability, to fiscal financing in World War II and its aftermath, to a strong anti-inflation focus from the late 1970s, and then back to greater emphasis on...

There is a substantial literature arguing that financial development contributes to economic growth. In this paper, we contribute to this literature by examining the effect of state-level banking regulation on financial development and economic growth in the United States from 1900 to 1940....

In the last two decades, there has been a global sea change in the theory and practice of central banking. The currently dominant “best practice” approach to central banking consists of the following: (1) central bank independence (2) a focus on inflation fighting (including adopting formal...

This volume contains a collection of papers, commentaries and speeches that review the strategic and operational decisions taken by the central banks to combat the crisis and that reflect on the lessons for the future. The contributions are grouped around five broad topics: monetary policy...

Like many countries, Spain has gone through a series of financial crises, both before and after its industrialization. There are many underlying causes for these crises, as well as for the current Spanish downturn. It is worth noting that there are similarities between recessions throughout the...

The intellectual response to the Great Depression is often portrayed as a battle between the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Yet both the Austrian and the Keynesian interpretations of the Depression were incomplete. Austrians could explain how a country might get into a...

The Eurozone crisis mobilises an appreciable amount of the attention of politicians and the public, with calls for a decisive defence of the euro, because the single currency’s demise is said to be the beginning of the end of the EU and Single European Market. In our view, preserving the euro...

The United States Constitution evidently calls for monetary arrangements with a strict metallic standard-gold, silver, or bimetallic. How were these provisions overturned so as to result in todayfs fiat- money arrangement with no trace of a metallic standard? A crucial step involved Supreme...

This paper seeks to provide a new and chiefly monetary explanation for the origins of the sixteenth-century era of sustained inflation (c.1520 - c.1640) commonly known as the Price Revolution'; and in particular it provides an answer to the question: not, as traditionally posed, why did the...