James Grant Interview

James Grant discusses his new book "Mr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond" and other issues with Bloomberg's Tom Keene. You can listen to the talk here.

Add This Book to Your Summer Reading List

This is a book that has policy implications for central banks today. From the publisher:

In Good Money, George Selgin tells the story of a fascinating and important yet almost unknown episode in the history of money—British manufacturers’ challenge to the Crown’s monopoly on coinage.

In the 1780s, when the Industrial Revolution was gathering momentum, the Royal Mint failed to produce enough small-denomination coinage for factory owners to pay their workers. As the currency shortage threatened to derail industrial progress, manufacturers began to mint custom-made coins, called “tradesman’s tokens.” Rapidly gaining wide acceptance, these tokens served as the nation’s most popular currency for wages and retail sales until 1821, when the Crown outlawed all moneys except its own.

Good Money not only examines the crucial role of private coinage in fueling Great Britain’s Industrial Revolution, but it also challenges beliefs upon which all modern government-currency monopolies rest. It thereby sheds light on contemporary private-sector alternatives to government-issued money, such as digital monies, cash cards, electronic funds transfer, and (outside of the United States) spontaneous “dollarization.”

Read more about the book here.

Looking for an Updated Monetary Textbook

I am slated to teach two sections of undergraduate Money & Banking in the fall semester and am already being accosted by the book reps. Talking with the book reps started me thinking--are there any monetary textbooks out there that will make sense in the fall? Given the ongoing meltdown in financial markets and the many central banking innovations that have taken place in response (e.g. TAF, TSLF), I suspect many, if not all, monetary texts will have gaping holes in them. So I was pleased to read Jim Hamilton was thinking along similar lines when wrote the following:

If you took a college course on monetary policy more than six months ago, what you learned has already been rendered out of date by the big changes Bernanke has implemented in how monetary policy can be used.

So are there any monetary textbooks out there that will reflect the new realities of central banking? Fortunately, we live in a world of the internet and economic blogging where all you need to know about this crisis is just a click away. Still, it would be nice to have a textbook that is current for students.

Update

I should have stated more explicitly that the link above is to Francisco M. Torralba's nice summary of the Fed's new tools. Also, see Vincent Reinhart's article, "The Fed's New Alphabet Soup."

A New International Economics Book

I just received my copy of the new International Economics textbook by Robert Feenstra and Alan Taylor. My initial thoughts are that this book has the user friendly feel of introductory economic textbook but the substance of the Krugman & Obstfeld text. Most of my students in my international economics class are non-econ majors and they find the Krugman and Obstfeld text too dense. I am going to give this text a try in the Fall.

You can buy the book from Worth publishers either whole or broken down into its international trade and international macro sections. My dream is one day to have a international trade and an international macro course here instead of cramming them both into an one semester course. Should that day come, this text would be ideal.