Before the invention of money (coin, paper, or digital) there was barter trading, a form of exchange without the use of a monetary medium. The evolution of money has kept pace with the evolution of humans. Money was not invented solely for transaction purposes; it was created to quantify wealth...

I consider whether a rules-based fiat money system can outperform the gold standard in delivering economic stability. I discuss the potential objectives of monetary policy in Section 1 and the means for achieving the objective in Section 2. I turn to questions of political economy in Section 3....

Under what conditions can policymakers make demonstrably poor policy choices? By providing a new account of monetary policy management in the Netherlands during the interwar gold standard, we show how policymakers can fail to escape their long-held beliefs and refuse to consider available policy...

I study whether monetary gold hoarding was the main cause of the Great Depression in a structural VAR analysis. The notion that monetary forces played an important role in bringing about the depression is well established in the narrative literature, but has more recently met some skepticism by...

This paper provides an introduction to the special issue on international lending of last resort. Starting from debates about rescue operations and unconventional policies of major central banks in the contexts of the Global Financial Crisis and the European Debt Crisis, it draws attention to...

The great depression of 1929 and the great financial crisis of 2008 have been the two big events of the last 75 years. Not only have they produced serious economic consequences but they also changed our view of economics and policymaking. The aim of this work is to compare these two great crises...

Bank leverage constraints can emerge from regulatory capital requirements as well as from central bank collateral requirements in reserve lending facilities. While these two channels are usually examined separately, we are able to compare them with the help of a bank money creation model in...

This article describes in some detail the properties of free market money and banking so as to contrast state-controlled central bank money and banking. It examines seven steps that government takes to replace the free market with central banking as it creates a banking system cartel. A number...

We provide evidence on the estimated effects of digital euro news on bank valuations and lending and find that they depend on deposit reliance and design features aimed at calibrating the quantity of CBDC. Then, we develop a quantitative DSGE model that replicates such evidence and incorporates...