Monday, December 3, 2018

Resolution

Governments of the advanced industrial economies should phase out the use of paper money in the form of large-denomination notes and sharply restrict the use of crypto-currencies.

For the affirmative:

Kenneth Rogoff is Thomas D. Cabot Professor at Harvard University.  From 2001–2003, Rogoff served as Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund.  His widely-cited 2009 book with Carmen Reinhart, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, shows the remarkable quantitative similarities across time and countries in the run-up and the aftermath of severe financial crises. Rogoff is also known for his seminal work on exchange rates and on central bank independence.  Rogoff’s 2016 book The Curse of Cash looks at the past, present and future of currency from standardized coinage to crypto-currencies. His monthly syndicated column on global economic issues is published in over 50 countries.

For the negative:

Lawrence H. White is Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He is a Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute and a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Mercatus Center. His latest books are The Clash of Economic Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and (as co-editor) Renewing the Search for a Monetary Constitution (Cato Institute, 2015).  Best known for his work on market-based monetary systems, White is also author of Free Banking in Britain (1984; 2nd ed. 1995), Competition and Currency (1989), and The Theory of Monetary Institutions (1999). His research has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, and other leading economics journals.