In a world where the means of exchange is convertible into the numeraire consumption good at a fixed rate, no one wants to hold money over time – and due to convertibility there is no means by which the Friedman rule can generate deflation. This is the environment we study in this paper in...

This paper studies the development of the practice of central banking in the early 19th century by engaging in a detailed analysis of the Bank of England's changing policies with respect to its discounts and lending to the private sector. To set the scene, the practices that characterized the...

This paper argues that an early 20th century central banker, had he been alive at the turn of the 21st century, would have predicted the 2007-08 crisis and its severity. This paper is Part II of a series which contends that early 20th century banking theory is a valuable framework for...

This paper uses a new monetarist framework to present and explain the basic elements of a non-monetarist theory of money, classical banking theory, by modeling acceptance banking, the form of banking that was dominant during the 19th century when the theory was developed. The most important...

The growth of “market-based” lending is closely related to the growth of repurchase agreements and similar contracts that grant the lender the right to sell collateral on the market if a threshold level of over-collateralization is not maintained. This paper argues that this contractual...

The safety of repurchase agreements (repos) depends on the neoclassical premise that markets are reliable sources of liquidity; repos in practice disprove the theory by generating collateral calls, collateral sales, liquidity events and liquidity-driven losses for repo-borrowing funds and their...

In this paper I consider how the systems of private money in Venice, Amsterdam and England dealt with financial crises and raise the possibility that the institutional structure of the banking system that developed in 18th century England was particularly well adapted to addressing system-wide...