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Cryptocurrencies are a different sort of financial technology from bank deposits, yet they are being shoehorned into the same category for regulatory purposes.
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Let’s hope other Argentinian economists give this proposal serious consideration.
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Facebook’s Libra is easily and probably rightly criticized by crypto purists as a halfway house that makes too many concessions to legacy systems and plays too nicely with the existing regulatory system. All true. But that’s not where the story ends.
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If the binding zero lower bound did not prolong the last recession, it may not prolong the next.
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The origin of money, the history of central banks, the operation and destruction of the gold standard, the rise of inflation and massive government debt, the disastrous bailouts of 2008 – it’s all covered in an outstanding hour-long documentary appearing on PBS stations called In Money We Trust.
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The greatest risk to the US dollar may, in fact, come from within. The imposition of tariffs and sanctions create an opportunity for other countries to engage in bilateral trade. The decision to withdraw from the free trade initiatives such as the TPP and T-TIP weakens not only the prospects for US trade but also…
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A new type of financial institution could take root in the U.S. But the Federal Reserve seems determined to prevent this from happening.
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Pretty much every economics textbook explains how money has four functions. It is first and foremost a medium of exchange, and it ultimately derives all of its other functions from its usefulness as a medium of exchange.
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Technology rarely does what we hope or predict it will do. In a year of falling exchange rates and failed ICOs, Facebook’s co-option of blockchain technology might be the best news for the industry of 2018.
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Under ideal conditions, stablecoins would come to exist due to pure market demand rather than as a reflection of the regulatory climate that has limited access to conventional banking services.
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For both social contract theory and monetary theory, theorists are considering something that never happened in the past and that they have no reason to believe will happen in the future. No such considerations are useful.
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Right now, we have a disordered and dysfunctional money system. This poses very acute risks and dangers that because of the nature or money can have system-wide effects. We should look at how monetary systems have been reformed in previous times, and also rethink the way money is commonly taught and thought about.