The United States has endured crippling financial crises, together with many other sorts of monetary disorder, throughout its history. Why? The popular answer has long been that U.S. banks have been under-regulated, that increased regulation and centralization over the years have helped, and that still more regulation and centralization is needed. In Money: Free and Unfree, George Selgin turns this conventional wisdom on its head. Through a series of painstakingly researched essays covering U.S. monetary history since before the Civil War, he traces U.S. financial disorders to their source in misguided government regulations. State governments were early culpritsbut in taking advantage of the Civil War to dramatically increase its own involvement in the banking and currency system, the federal government set the stage for even worse problems to come. Instead of addressing the root causes of these crises, the Federal Reserve Act reinforced some of them, while dramatically increasing the potential for politically-motivated abuse of monetary policy. Selgin's revisionist thesis may shock and anger champions of monetary orthodoxy, but they'll be hard-pressed to refute the solid scholarship upon which that thesis rests.
George Selgin is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Georgia. His research covers a broad range of topics within the field of monetary economics, including monetary history, macroeconomic theory, and the history of monetary thought. He is the author of The Theory of Free Banking (Rowman & Littlefield, 1988); Bank Deregulation and Monetary Order (Routledge, 1996); Less Than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy (The Institute of Economic Affairs, 1997); and Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage (University of Michigan Press, 2008).
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