Golden moments
[Dave Birch] Now that I’ve taken to riding my new government-subsidised bicycle to work, I’ve got more time to listen to podcasts (through one earphone only, for safety reasons) and I’ve been getting through a fair few recently. One that blog readers might enjoy is the podcast of a presentation by Lawrence White at the Foundation for Economic Education on the Gold Standard, which includes some speculation on how the United States might return to a Gold Standard. This is fascinating stuff for anyone who is genuinely interested in the way that money works, and how information and communication technologies might cause disruptive change in the future. Lawrence is the F. A. Hayek Professor of Economic History at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute. He is the author of two of my favourite books, Competition and Currency and Free Banking in Britain, which I have open on the desk in front of me as I’m researching the “Scottish experiment” in monetary competition for a paper that I’m writing.
