BREAKDOWN: The History, Present and Future of Central Banks, Feat. George Selgin
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2020
⏱️ 80 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
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
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
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| 0:49.6 | Sure, let's think about ending the Fed. |
| 0:52.7 | Let's consider it, but consider how you could possibly do |
| 0:57.1 | that in a way that will succeed, both in the sense that you really do end up with a lot less |
| 1:02.6 | federal reserve than you have today, if not zero federal reserve, whatever that might mean. |
| 1:08.6 | But you also end up with a U.S. dollar that preserves its value |
| 1:13.8 | and is a good medium of exchange in other ways. Now, if you can figure out how to do that, |
| 1:20.7 | then please do it. I've been thinking about it a lot, but I'm not going around with a t-shirt |
| 1:26.7 | that says end the Fed until I |
| 1:28.9 | really figured it out. And I'm certainly not going to pretend that that's a policy solution |
| 1:35.4 | when it's just a slogan so far. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. |
| 1:49.4 | The breakdown is sponsored by crypto.com, BitStamp, and nexo.io, and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. |
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