The History, Present and Future of Central Banks, Feat. George Selgin

The Director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives gives an eye-opening, 200-year history of today’s most powerful economic institution.

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This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Bitstamp and Nexo.io.

Today on the Brief:

Better news in the jobless claims this week
A new bitcoin adoption cycle?
Checking on Lebanon

Our main conversation is with Dr. George Selgin.

Dr. Selgin is a Senior Fellow and director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives as well as Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Georgia.

In this eye-opening conversation, he and NLW go deep on the history, present and future of central banks, including:

Why the Scottish and Canadian banking systems in the 19th century show that central banks aren’t a prerequisite for stability
Why the U.S. “free banking” system wasn’t free at all
Why the instability in the late 19th century U.S. banking system was caused by regulation, not the lack of a Federal Reserve
Why the Fed’s first decades were a disaster
Why the Fed gets more power when it underperforms
The problems with the Fed’s response to 2008
What lessons the Fed could have learned (but didn’t) between the Great Financial Crisis and COVID-19

Find our guest online:

Website: Alt-M.org

Twitter: @GeorgeSelgin

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