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There are thousands of fears, from arachnophobia to globophobia (fear of balloons) to zoophobia (fear of animals). What might the fear of market illiquidity look like? Say that you are petrified that a day will come when markets will be too illiquid for you to convert your wealth into the things you need. There are two ways for you to buy complete peace of mind. The first strategy involves selling everything you own now and buying checking deposits, the sine qua non liquid asset. Get rid of the house, the bonds, the stocks, the car, your couch, and your books. Use some of the proceeds to rent a house and a car, borrow books, and lease furniture. In renting back the stream of consumption benefits that you've just sold, your level of consumption stays constant. Negotiate the rental arrangements so that the lessor—the owner—cannot cancel them, and so that you can walk out of them at a moment's notice. Structuring things this way ensures that rental obligations in no way inhib...

Recent posts by Adrian Hope Baille and Sina Motamedi have got me thinking again about the idea of the Federal Reserve (or any other central bank for that matter) adopting bitcoin technology. Here's an older post of mine on the idea, although this post will take a different tack. The bitcoin ethos enshrines the idea of a world free from the totalitarian control of central banks. So in exploring the idea of Fed-run bitcoin-style ledger, I realize that I run the risk of being cast as Darth Vader (or even *yikes* the Emperor) by bitcoin true believers. So be it . While I do empathize with the bitcoin ideal—I support freedom in banking—I rank the importance of bitcoin-as-product above bitcoin-as-philosophy . And at the moment, bitcoin is not a great product. While bitcoin has many useful features, these are all overshadowed by the fact that its price is too damn volatile for it to be be taken seriously as an exchange medium. This volatility arises because bitcoin lacks a fundamenta...

I gave myself a quick whiff this week to determine if I pass the market monetarist smell test. This is by no means definitive, nor is this an officially administered MM® test. To be clear, my preferred policy end point is market choice in centralized banking. In other words, you, me, and my grandma should be able to start up a central bank. But that's a post for another day. First-best option aside, here's my reading of a few market monetarist ideas. Target the forecast **** 5 stars Big fan. Targeting the forecast would take away the ad hoccery and mystique that surrounds central banks. We want central bankers to be passive managers of yawn-inducing utilities, not all-stars who make front covers of magazines. First, have the central bank set a clear target x. This is the number that the central bank is mandated to hit in the course of manipulating its various levers, buttons, and pulleys. Modern central banks sorta set targets—they reserve the right to be flexible. Bu this isn...

American Depository Receipt (ADR) for Sony Corp You've heard the story before. It goes something like this. There's one unique good in this world that serves as a universal vehicle by which we conduct every one of our economic transactions. We call this good "money". Quarrels often start over what items get lumped together as money, but paper currency and deposits usually make the grade. If we want to convert the things that we've produced into desirable consumption goods (or long-term savings vehicles like stocks), we need to pass through this intervening "money" medium to get there. This of course is fiction—there never has been an item that served as a universal medium of exchange. Rather, all valuable things serve to some degree or other as a medium of exchange; or, put differently, everything is money. What follows are several examples illustrating this idea. Rather than using currency/deposits as the intervening medium to get to their desired final...