This paper examines the causes and consequences of the current global financial crisis. It largely relies on the work of Hyman Minsky, although analyses by John Kenneth Galbraith and Thorstein Veblen of the causes of the 1930s collapse are used to show similarities between the two crises. K.W....

This paper examines the causes and consequences of the current global financial crisis. It largely relies on the work of Hyman Minsky, although analyses by John Kenneth Galbraith and Thorstein Veblen of the causes of the 1930s collapse are used to show similarities between the two crises. K.W....

This paper reviews what cryptocurrencies are, and it frames them within the context of historical monetary experiences and contemporary monetary economics. The paper argues that, as pure duciary private money, cryptocurrencies are a bubble without a fundamental value and that they will not...

Low and unresponsive inflation has been termed a “puzzle.” The paper describes a formula for which these conditions have been a prediction since early 2016.The Money Value Formula analyzes the unit value of a currency solely as a function of long lags of monetary aggregates. The Formula...

Economics is not a hard science, subject to controlled experiments. In their absence, we economists construct narratives to explain events, often involving key sound bites. Among the sound bites of the financial crisis are the following: “Separate the casino from the utility bank”;...

The financial crisis has revealed fatal institutional and structural deficits at the finance market. Politics has reacted to the financial crisis with a sea of legal bills and regulations. But all regulating efforts are merely system-imminent reparation measures and do not solve the core...

At the time of publication, this article provided the most in-depth critique of capital account liberalization in any U.S. law journal. The article stemmed from a paper presented by the author to the Seventh Annual Conference of the United States-Mexico Law Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico on...

Two extraordinary inflation surprises of the last generation were the longstanding inflation shortfall from central bank targets and now the pandemic inflationary.Inflation shortfalls can be attributed to characteristics of monetary systems represented by a model with increasing inelasticity,...

This study identifies empirically the impact of various macroeconomic factors on the default risk premium. Using monthly data for the period 1970-2010 for the U.S., our estimations indicate that the monetary policy aggregates, risk-free interest rate, term structure of interest rates, inflation,...

The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) System is a large, complex, and understudied government-sponsored liquidity facility that currently has more than $1 trillion in secured loans outstanding, mostly to commercial banks and thrifts. In this paper, we document the significant role played by the FHLB...