"The recurrent banking panics of the 19th century and the Great Depression of the 1930s are widely viewed as failures of our economic system. A simple version of Samuelson's overlapping generations model is used to generate such failures of Walrasian equilibrium. The spontaneous "panics"...

In "The Inefficiency of Interest-Bearing National Debt," (JPE, April 1979) we argued that private sector transaction costs are needed in order to explain interest on government debt. It follows that if the government's transaction costs do not depend on its portfolio, then, barring special...