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

The Breakdown

Blockworks

Investing, Business

4.8 • 786 Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2020

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today on the Brief: Better news in the jobless claims this week A new bitcoin adoption cycle? A check in 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 that central banks aren’t a prerequisite for stability Why the USA’s “free banking” system wasn’t free at all Why the instability in the late 19th century US banking system was caused by regulation, not the lack of a Fed 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 but didn’t learn between the Great Financial Crisis and COVID-19 Find our guest online Website: Alt-M.org Twitter: @GeorgeSelgin

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sure, let's think about ending the Fed. Let's consider it. But consider how you could possibly do that in a way that will succeed, both in the sense that you really do end up with a lot less Federal Reserve than you have today, if not zero Federal Reserve, whatever that might mean. But you also end up with a U.S. dollar that preserves
0:23.3	its value and is a good medium of exchange in other ways. Now, if you can figure out how to do
0:30.1	that, then please do it. I've been thinking about it a lot, but I'm not going around with a t-shirt
0:37.0	that says end the Fed until I
0:39.2	really figured it out. And I'm certainly not going to pretend that that's a policy solution
0:45.6	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.
0:59.6	The breakdown is sponsored by crypto.com, BitStamp, and nexo.io, and produced and distributed by CoinDesk.
1:09.6	What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, August 6th, and today our main conversation is another
1:15.6	amazing interview this time with George Selgin, the director of the Center for Monetary
1:22.6	and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute. It's an amazing historical look at central banks that I know
1:29.3	you're going to love. But first, let's do the brief. First up on the brief today, the FBI has
1:36.0	rated social media influencer Jake Paul's house in—I'm just kidding. Let's talk about jobless
1:42.0	claims. So what happened? The jobless claims,
1:45.3	the new initial jobless claims fell 249,000 to 1.19 million. The forecast had been 1.4 million,
1:53.5	so obviously an improvement. Continuing claims decreased as well. They decreased 844,000 to 16.1 million. Both of these numbers are really,
2:04.3	really good in context of a reversing trend that we'd seen over the last couple weeks,
2:09.9	where things had actually been getting worse. Now, of course, the overall magnitude of these
2:15.7	numbers is still really, really not good, right?
2:19.1	Still more than a million new claims per week.
2:21.6	However, if we're viewing it in the trend, the worst potential was that we were going to continue
2:26.4	to see a rise.
2:28.2	We'll get more information tomorrow with the July report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
	...

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