As the Mercatus Center’s Scott Sumner often says, one ought never to reason from a price change. Interest rates, like other prices, can change for all sorts of reasons; the implications of the change generally depend on the particular reason for such a change.
Are interest rates not prices? And if so, should they not be discovered instead of imposed?
[Alexander Hamilton] was decidedly retrograde in pushing for an exclusive nationwide bank with a sweetheart government deal. He was not a creative policy genius so much as a persuasive second-hand dealer in discredited mercantilist ideas.
The Federal Reserve has been in the news a lot lately because of its attempts at conducting monetary policy in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In December of 2015 the Fed’s policy-making body, the Federal Open Market Committee, voted for the first time in 7 years to raise the interest rate on bank […]
“Is Now the Time to Kill the $100 Bill?” That’s the title of a Wednesday, February 17 article in the Wall Street Journal, prompted in part by a blog post from former Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence H. Summers.The article states that the Treasury Department has no current plans to eliminate the $100 bill, so […]