This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 13th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

On Wednesday, the Cato Institute will host its 25th annual monetary conference. Cato Institute Vice President for Academic

Affairs, Jim Dorn, gives us a preview.

Well, this year is our 25th annual monetary conference. I've been doing it since I've been

about 10 years old and we're going to look at monetary arrangements in the 21st century.

The very first conference dealt with the monetary arrangements in the 21st century.

The very first conference dealt with the search for stable money.

So this theme continues.

What we're interested in looking at is the monetary institutions and how they can best

protect the value of the dollar as well as protect individual freedom.

Detail some of the topics that the speakers will be talking about.

Well, our keynote address this year is going to be given by Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

And they haven't given us a specific topic, but I think he'll probably be saying something about transparency, the need

for transparency at the Fed.

The Fed's been moving towards a more transparent monetary regime announcing what's going on at the Federal Open Market Committee meetings.

Bernanke himself has advocated kind of a soft inflation target for the Fed, but not an explicit inflation target regime.

So I don't know whether he'll address that or not, but certainly with the subprime mortgage crisis, the following dollar, monetary policy

is more important than ever, and especially transparency.

And in addition to Bernanke, we've got the assistant governor of the People's Bank of China,

E Gong.

And we're very fortunate to have him with us.

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