I offer a plan for supplying liquidity during financial emergencies that altogether dispenses with direct central-bank lending. The plan instead relies upon "flexible" open market operations to supply liquidity in amounts needed and to firms most in need of it, where the necessary "flexibility"...

Modern paper currency contributes little to productive investment. This shortcoming is not inherent to paper money. It stems from the fact that such money is monopolistically supplied by public monetary authorities that are poor intermediaries. Commercial banknotes, in contrast, are just as...

This article challenges the claim that Great Britain solved its 'big problem of small change' (the problem of keeping decent low-denomination coins in circulation) by embracing Matthew Boulton's steam-based coining technology. Evidence from Great Britain's commercial token episode (1787-97)...

Although its role has been overlooked by monetary historians, a two-cent tax on bank checks effective from June 1932 through December 1934 appears to have been an important contributing factor to that period's severe monetary contraction. According to our estimates, the currency-demand deposit...

Contrary to the claims of Arthur Rolnick and Warren Weber, Gresham's Law is not a "fallacy." Nor does it rest on the unrealistic assumption of an operational fixed (disequilibrium) exchange rate between two economically distinct monies. Here I interpret Gresham's Law as a result of coercive...

In Fragile by Design (2014), Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber argue that banking crises, instead of being traceable to inherent weaknesses of fractional-reserve banking, have their roots in politically-motivated government interference with banking systems that might otherwise be robust. The...

As the one-hundredth anniversary of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act approaches, we assess whether the nation's experiment with the Federal Reserve has been a success or a failure. Drawing on a wide range of recent empirical research, we find the following: (1) The Fed's full history (1914 to...