Monetary Policy

The following is an excerpt from "Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America" by Peter Conti-Brown and Sean H. Vanatta, now out at Princeton University Press. 

Stigler Center Assistant Director Matt Lucky reviews Kenneth Rogoff’s new book, Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead, which reflects on the rise and ongoing fall of the American dollar’s global dominance. Rogoff discusses his book with Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales on this week’s Capitalisn’t episode, which you can listen to here.

The United States President has halted plans for a central bank digital currency: a mere show of strength to undermine the Fed’s independence, writes...

Nobel Prize-winning economist Eugene Fama argues that Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed and predicts it has a near-certain chance of becoming worthless within a decade....

In a new paper, Sebastian Edwards details the numerous and varied contributions of University of Chicago faculty to exchange rates and monetary policy from 1892 to 1992.

The following is an excerpt from the book, Balance of Power: Central Banks and the Fate of Democracies, by Éric Monnet.

The 2023 banking crisis that took down four banks, including Silicon Valley Bank, by all appearances appears to have been resolved by public intervention. Yet, Viral Acharya and Raghuram Rajan argue, this leaves many of the underlying weaknesses that contributed to the bank failures unaddressed. Moreover, while the authorities’ temporary fixes have stopped the panic, the system will have to absorb more unrecognized losses over time.

Politicians often interfere with central banks, but it is not clear how to measure such political pressure systematically and therefore difficult to quantify its economic consequences. In new research, Thomas Drechsel finds that political pressure strongly and persistently raises inflation and inflation expectations but has little impact on economic activity.

In this second article on real estate in the current high-interest-rate environment, Joseph L. Pagliari Jr. explores banks’ exposure to commercial real estate, who might help fill the credit void as bank funding dries up, how the work-from-home phenomenon impacts commercial real estate prices, particularly the office sector, and what risks large urban centers face with emptied office buildings.

There are concerns among bankers and economists that commercial real estate prices are at risk of decreasing substantially. Joseph L. Pagliari, Jr. explains how commercial real estate should be priced based on current and projected inflation and interest rates. A subsequent article will explore if concerns about bank and broader economic vulnerabilities to lower CRE prices.