Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Resolution

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation should be abolished in favor of private sector solutions for protecting the safety of bank deposits.

For the affirmative:

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. He is the author of The Theory of Free Banking (Rowman & Littlefield, 1988), Bank Deregulation and Monetary Order (Routledge, 1996), Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage (University of Michigan Press, 2008), Money: Free and Unfree (The Cato Institute, 2015), Less Than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy (The Cato Institute, 2018), and Floored! How a Misguided Fed Experiment Deepened and Prolonged the Great Recession (The Cato Institute 2018). Selgin holds a B.A. in economics and zoology from Drew University, and a Ph.D. in economics from New York University.

For the negative:

Joshua A. Barro is an American journalist who currently contributes to Business Insider as a political commentator. Barro previously worked as a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, as a real estate banker for Wells Fargo, as the lead writer for the Ticker, an economics and politics blog hosted by Bloomberg L.P., and as the politics editor at Business Insider. He appears regularly on Bloomberg Television and MSNBC and has appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO and on All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC.

Time named Barro's Twitter feed one of "The 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2013," one of ten in the Politics category. In 2012, Forbes selected him as one of the "30 Under 30" media "brightest stars under the age of 30," and David Brooks listed him as part of the "vibrant and increasingly influential center-right conversation." A former aide to Barack Obama included Barro on a short list of Obama's favorite columnists. He is currently the host and moderator of KCRW's Left, Right & Center.

In 2014, Barro left Business Insider to join The New York Times' "The Upshot." In 2016, Barro was again hired by Business Insider as a senior editor.