The Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives presents a special “live” edition of Russ Roberts’s EconTalk on Renewing the Search for a Monetary Constitution. Featuring the coeditor Lawrence H. White, Professor of Economics, George Mason University; interviewed by Russ Roberts, Host, EconTalk, and Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University; with an introduction by George Selgin, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Financial and Monetary Alternatives, Cato Institute.
Despite their substantial independence and discretionary powers, central banks have generally failed to achieve their goals of maintaining either low and stable inflation or tolerably low unemployment. Many blame monetary discretion for this failure, noting that such discretion tempts central bankers to engage in monetary “fine tuning” that ends up fueling booms and busts, leaving declared objectives to fall by the wayside. Should monetary authorities be reined in by a constitution? If so, how might this be done successfully? The essays in Renewing the Search for a Monetary Constitution, by Lawrence White and others, address these and other crucial questions.