Studying private currencies since before they became cool. Prof of Economics at George Mason U. Latest book = Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin? (2023).
On the cover of the 22 October New Yorker: an unflattering caricature of rich men in suits. On the inside cover and first page: a two-page spread advertising suits for rich men.
We will cripple the Russian economy by cutting off their access to world markets. They will have to buy Russian.
We will strengthen the American economy by cutting off our own access to world markets. Buy American!
One of these two does not compute.
Anybody who doesn't understand that the economy's indefinite growth is in the value of output, not in the physical mass of output, is either ignorant, or a TV show host.
Paul Krugman is not a historian of economic thought; he only role-plays one in his NYT opinion column. He has never understood the Austrian / Hayekian theory of the business cycle, so he thinks that it couldn't have been a serious rival to Keynes’s theory in the 1930s. But
/1
Milei wins handily! I look forward to
@ocampo_emilio
and his team systematically withdrawing the Argentine peso and winding down the central bank. It will be the blessed end of a high-Inflation era.
Biden approval rating: 42.7%. If you're not with the 57.3% majority who don't approve, then you know, that is extreme. Biden approvers are extremists. QED.
Roubini refers to "irresponsible behavior"? Going on TV to say that BTC has zero use case, having made no effort to become better informed, THAT is irresponsible behavior.
Aug 1961 to Aug 1971, the geometric average US inflation rate (CPI-U) was 1.3% per year. Aug 1971 to Aug 1981, the average inflation rate was 8.5% per year. Hmmm. Did something change in August 1971?
@cafreiman
Ricardo and Marx struggled with the "transformation problem" of accounting for the time-value of money in a labor-theory-of-value framework. Existential Comics: "Easy. It's theft."
Today I learned that Elon Musk doesn't understand how bond yields are determined. Not by the Treasury's choice of coupon rate, but by market determination of the bond's price via discounting its coupons and principal. Market discount rates up, bond prices down, bond yields up.
@paulg
FDIC needs to change to unlimited coverage to stop bank runs and Treasury needs to stop issuing ridiculously high yield bills, such that it makes no sense to have money in a low interest rate bank “savings” account. Right now.
Professor Blanchard needs to update his thinking. Lowering inflation does not require, nor is it even associated with, higher unemployment in the last 40 years of US data. The Phillips Curve is dead.
Source: McLeay and Tenreyro, NBER Macro Annual 2019, .
4. Short of a direct effect on inflation expectations, or mind control, or price/wage controls, this requires slowing down the economy, and thus increasing unemployment. To me, the increase in unemployment is causal, and needed to reduce inflation.
Carl Menger's influential Principles of Economics was published in 1871, 150 years ago.
That's a lot of years. And yet I have spoken with a man who himself saw Menger at the University of Vienna.
The view that states are responsible for the introduction of money is just as implausible as the view that states are responsible for the introduction of language. Ditto for the view that state actions improve money or language.
MMT has obviously proven correct.
It’s big claim was that massive deficits would not lead to runaway interest via bond vigilantes or insolvency.
Huge win.
MMTers never said to fight inflation with tax hikes.
#Fail
Kamala Harris: "Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place."
Really? Are there no differences in human talents, tastes, or efforts?
F. A. Hayek: "There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal."
"A cryptocurrency is not a currency, not a commodity, and not a security. Instead, it's a gambling contract with a nearly 100 percent edge for the house." – Charlie Munger
Useful example for teaching students how it's a mistake to think that a lower rate of inflation (lower *rate of growth* in the price level) means a drop in the *level* of prices.
Let me be clear to any corporation that hasn’t brought their prices back down even as inflation has come down: It’s time to stop the price gouging.
Give American consumers a break.
Given the checkered history of fiat monies, why do so many economists defend fiat standards? Mostly they defend an ideal version of how a fiat standard could perform, not how the typical fiat standard has performed in practice.
UK Exchequer: We'll be cutting taxes and borrowing massive sums.
Market: We fear that the Bank of England will monetize the debt and amplify inflation. We're dumping £ bonds.
Bank of England: To calm the bond market, we're going to monetize the debt.
Matt Stoller, a would-be anti-monopolist, seems unaware that crypto remittance services are helping to break up the market dominance of Western Union and MoneyGram, bringing down prices to consumers.
Cryptocurrencies should obviously be banned. Let's just stop playing passive aggressive here, crypto is interesting technology used almost entirely by scammers and money launderers. And forcing them to obey the law is the same as banning.
Inflation occurs when employers raise prices. Profit drives their decisions. But they dare not publicly admit that reason. Instead they blame gov't or rising wages or "shortages" etc.: anything/anyone but themselves. Dont be fooled.
30% in the first round for a candidate who wants to abolish the central bank and dollarize. Remarkable and encouraging, whatever disagreements I may have with Milei on other issues.
Javier Milei’s showing has sent a message to Buenos Aires—and the world—that the Argentine middle class may no longer accept a status quo that robs them of the fruits of their labor. via
@WSJopinion
Bitcoin supply is not like wheat supply. Bitcoin's quantity is on a pre-determined path. Price below the current cost of "production" (mining) reduces mining but does nothing to reduce supply. The current cost of mining therefore gives zero support to the price of Bitcoin.
"Bitcoin’s price sits at the lower bound of its production cost for the first time since the March 2020 liquidity crisis as well. The idea here is that Bitcoin should at minimum be worth the cost of energy to produce it." -
@WClementeIII
Krugman's NYT opinion column is here:
For a very helpful account of the Austrian theory incorporating the economy's production possibilities frontier, see Roger Garrison here:
Building a bridge uses labor and capital. What follows?
a) It is a waste.
b) It is worth doing.
c) Neither. Cost > 0 does not imply cost > benefit (waste). Nor is resource use itself a benefit. (Bridge to nowhere is waste.)
Correct answer: c.
OK?
Now try "Bitcoin uses energy."
ON THIS DAY IN BITCOIN HISTORY. On 28 Dec. 2009, New Liberty Standard , the first market maker in Bitcoin, posted these bid and ask prices. To get inventory, NLS had in Oct. bought 5050 BTC from
@marttimalmi
for $5.02 in the first known BTC/USD trade.
Bindsell and Schaaf seem to think, mistakenly, that if BTC is not a common medium of exchange for everyone, it is not a useful medium of exchange for anyone for any purpose. The concept of a successful niche medium of exchange for legitimate purposes has eluded them.
Bitcoin has failed to become a global decentralised digital currency, instead falling victim to fraud and manipulation.
The recent approval of an ETF doesn’t change the fact that Bitcoin is costly, slow and inconvenient, argues
#TheECBBlog
in cases of slumping velocity. He called for stabilizing nominal income in a closed economy to avoid slumps due to an unsatisfied excess demand for money. See my article here:
@nic__carter
My two cents: You are talking sense about hyperinflation and she is not. Monetary expansion dilutes purchasing power, driving both domestic price inflation and falling FX value. Blaming speculators for the collapse of the dollar's peg to gold is what Nixon did to shift blame.
There is no exchange-rate model that is suitable for the determination of the Bitcoin/USD exchange rate. That’s why, although we know Bitcoin's price, it’s value is unknown & is probably ZERO. My latest interview with
@YahooNews
:
A "public good," in economics jargon, is non-rival in consumption and non-excludable.
Digital payment services are rival and excludable. Not a public good, even when nationalized like paper money. For centuries we used banknotes issued by private commercial banks.
@steve_hanke
@steve_hanke
, do you support complete know-your-customer rules and the Financial Action Task Force? Don't you favor a greater degree of financial privacy?
Some numbers: The CBO projects a US federal budget deficit of $200b/mo. in 2021. The Fed is currently buying >$120b/mo. in securities. Thus the Fed is financing >60% of the deficit by expanding the monetary base ("printing money").
Econ professor here. Let's end the Fed, but let's be clear: it's a government agency. The parts that are nominally private (the Reserve Banks) get their budgets and policy orders from the Board of Governors. The Governors are federal employees and Presidential appointees.
Krugman thinks “This [Austrian] view had logical problems: If transferring resources out of investment goods causes mass unemployment, why didn’t the same thing happen when resources were being transferred in and away from other industries?” PK’s puzzle comes from his
/3
Thanks to the generosity of new friends, I will be coming home from
@labitconf
in Buenos Aires with some typical products of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina.
neglecting the macro context. The latter transfer is driven by loose monetary policy that drives the economy temporarily outside the LR ppf. By contrast, the collapse of the boom is accompanied by a “secondary contraction” that pulls the economy inside the ppf.
/4
Krugman claims that “Hayek and Schumpeter were adamantly against any attempt to fight the Great Depression with monetary and fiscal stimulus.” Hayek thought “fiscal stimulus” a waste, yes. But in the fourth lecture of _Prices and Production_ he favored monetary expansion
/5
Senator Warren is absolutely correct to insist that Bitcoin is not the same as a government fiat currency. But she is mistaken to regard that as a case against Bitcoin. Without differences there would be no point to Bitcoin.
Once, in the 1990s, I joked that future historians of economic thought would describe me as a "minor pre-Selginian." The current issue of Reason Magazine comes close: it [] describes me as "Selgin's closest ideological ally in the free banking movement."
@NeerajKA
In April 2020 the Fed reclassified trillions in savings accounts and started counting them in M1, so that exaggerates the M1 rise. Stick to M2 for an undistorted measure of recent monetary expansion. It's alarming enough.
I'm always suspicious when a firm (especially the
#2
firm) wants its industry (including of course the
#1
firm) to be regulated more strictly. What makes Circle think that government regulation would build trust in stablecoins better than capital adequacy and market performance?
The time has come for the United States to lead the development of global rules that will determine how the U.S. dollar moves on the internet. If the dollar is going to remain the world’s reserve currency, then we need to build trust in digital dollars & regulate stablecoins
That (rare) "wildcat banking" problems were due to absence of regulation is a myth: they were due to bad regulations. That less-restricted private monies around the world have been less trustworthy than more-restricted or government-issued monies is untrue. Study the history.
Weird. Author Matt Stoller is a fellow of the Open Markets Institute, whose mission is "to expose the dangers of monopolization." But here he says that no private firm should be allowed to challenge the currency and payment system monopoly of the Fed.
Irony: A BBC correspondent in Russia this morning, observing on NPR that people who get their news and political commentary from state media tend to repeat the government's talking points almost word for word.
OG
@lawrencehwhite1
writing about
#cryptocurrencies
in 1995. (Check out that
@halfin
reference in the opening!) And yet many on
#bitcoin
Twitter dismiss economists out of hand—as if none of us have ever thought seriously about these things. 🙄
Leading proposals for a "national digital currency" would have the US government enter the retail payments business. That would be bad for efficiency and privacy, I argue in today's Wall Street Journal.
As a UCLA econ grad student, I took a course on Marxism in the Phil dept from Julius Sensat ("Anti-Samuelson"). The class was me and 6 lefties. They never did the reading, and shouted at Sensat for allowing me to raise Bohm-Bawerk's refutation of Marx's price theory. True story!
I just finished a 75-minute virtual presentation + Q&A with 100+ economists and staff at the International Monetary Fund, talking about private money in general and why we shouldn't restrict stablecoins (although caveat emptor). Good questions. Mostly skeptical, as you'd expect.
I used to vote for the Libertarian presidential candidate to register a clear protest against the other candidates who wanted to enlarge the state. I regret that voting Libertarian won't do that this year.
Vivek Ramaswamy, RFK Jr, and Donald Trump are scheduled to appear at the Libertarian Party National Convention at the end of the month.
What are your thoughts?
Paul Krugman fails the ideological Turing test. He can't conceive of any sincere and non-deluded position being held by people whose policy views differ from his.
When I buy milk with a credit card, the IOU to my card issuer didn’t previously exist. I created it out of thin air. And yet when the Fed buys milk with new IOU-nothings, diluting the value of existing dollars, people act like it’s different somehow.
When any entity (a government or a company) sells a bond, the bond didn’t exist until it was sold. The bond was created out of thin air. And yet when the Fed creates reserves out of thin air, somehow that’s seen as some kind of scandalous money printing. But it’s the same thing.
For those who remember the Liberty Dollar project, Troy echoes US Attorney Anne M. Tompkins' absurd and outrageous claim that peacefully offering silver coins as an alternative to fiat dollars was a form of "domestic terrorism.”
I can't stress this enough: the crypto attack on the dollar is not strictly a "pump and dump" or a "grift." It's an ideologically-driven attack on the legitimacy of fiat currency, the
@federalreserve
, and the incumbent financial system. It is the sequel to the January 6th attack.
When the majority votes for a monetary standard beyond the reach of its elected officials, that is democracy at the constitutional level tying the hands of democracy at the day-to-day political level.
It won't be a 2% annual tax on an individual's stock of wealth, but a 20% tax on each 10% annual increment to the individual's stock of wealth. See? Very different.
.
@SecYellen
on the proposed tax which would pay for the Build Back Better act: "It's not a wealth tax, but a tax on unrealized capital gains of exceptionally wealthy individuals."