Ep. 220: George Selgin on Fed Independence, Poor Operations and Inflation

George Selgin is a senior fellow and director emeritus 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 numerous books, including ‘The Theory of Free Banking’, ‘Floored! How a Misguided Fed Experiment Deepened and Prolonged the Great Recession’ and ‘The Menace of Fiscal QE’. George is one of the founders, with Kevin Dowd and Lawrence H. White, of the Modern Free Banking School, which draws its inspiration from the writings of F. A. Hayek on denationalization of money and choice in currency. In this podcast, we discuss: 

• How marine biology helps you understand economics 
• How the Fed fundamentally changed after the Global Financial Crisis 
• Understanding the Fed’s abundant reserves policy 
• Why Fed operations have harmed the system 
• Regional bank crisis 
• What caused post-COVID inflation? 
• Did the Fed do well during this period? 
• Inflation risks and next Fed move 
• Thoughts on growth 
• US elections 
• Fed independence and Trump 
• Fed losses 
• Books mentioned: Wealth of Nations (Smith), Lectures on Political Economy (Wicksell), The Theory of Money and Credit (Mises), Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (Jevons), Lombard Street (Bagehot) 

You can follow George on X, at Cato and can view his books here. 

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