Small steps, not a large leap, towards less black money & more digital money

 We are more than thirty days into Narendra Modi's demonetization campaign, and while many of the commentators I follow say that it is a...

Should we legalize the act of paying a bribe?

From the website IPaidaBribe.com A few months ago  I stumbled on Kaushik Basu's fascinating and readable  2011 paper Why, for a Class o...

A 21st century U.S. trade dollar

"America's only unwanted, unhonoured coin."  - John Willem on the silver trade dollar. The inspiration for this post comes fro...

A modern example of Gresham's Law

Sir Thomas Gresham Anyone who makes an effort to study monetary economics quickly encounters the concept of Gresham's law, or the idea t...

Modi's demonetization: chaos is a feature, not a bug

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's aggressive demonetization of the 500 and 1000 rupee note is causing plenty of chaos in India. A general ...

Aggressive demonetizations

Prime Minister Narendra Modi surprised Indians today by announcing that India's highest denomination notes, the 500 and 1000 rupee, wil...

Thoughts on Rogoff's 'Curse of Cash'

The US$5000 banknote, destroyed in 1969 along with the $10,000, $1000, and $500 notes With the publication of his new book The Curse of Cash...

How anonymous is cash?

Dutch 10 guilder note. Holland and Lebanon are the only countries to have issued banknotes with bar codes. One of the interesting things tha...

The strange mania for Swiss National Bank shares

The shares of the Swiss National Bank (SNB), Switzerland's central bank, have almost doubled since July, despite there being no real new...