During the past year, the press has had a field day pummeling “derivatives.” The Wall Street Journal has even joined in the fun. The grist for the journalists' mills has been provided by the big losses on derivatives reported by Metallgessellschaft, Proctor & Gamble, Air Products, Gibson...

In this century, three types of monetary systems have predominated: central banking, free banking, and currency boards. Central banking is familiar to us all, because it is today the monetary system of almost every country. Free banking once existed in approximately seventy countries during the...

There are roughly 1.5 million American Indians in the United States. Approximately half reside on or near publicly owned reservations. The reservations are held in trust by the Federal government and are managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)

To put an end to monetary mischief and rein in hyperinflation, Argentina established an unorthodox currency board system on April 1, 1991. Argentines called the system "convertibility," an uncommon term for an unusual system. Like all currency board arrangements, convertibility maintained a...

The dramatic events in Asia and Russia, and the contagion they have spread, have generated a torrent of commentary about exchange rates, hot money, and exchange controls. As someone who was deeply involved in Indonesia and who predicted that the ruble would collapse by midyear, I offer my views...

More care should be taken in presenting important statistics. Error and uncertainty in economic data renders it noisy As the noise in reported date increases, it interferes with the detection and interpretation of movements in the true value of the underlying data. Indeed, a noisy series is...