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George Selgin

Senior Fellow and Director Emeritus, Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives

George Selgin is a senior fellow and director emeritus of the of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute and professor emeritus of economics at the University of Georgia. His research covers a broad range of topics within the field of monetary economics, including monetary history, macroeconomic theory, and the history of monetary thought.

He is the author of numerous articles and books, including The Theory of Free Banking (Rowman & Littlefield, 1988); Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage (University of Michigan Press, 2008); Money: Free & Unfree (Cato Institute, 2017); Less Than Zero: The Case for a Falling Price Level in a Growing Economy (Cato Institute, 2018), Floored! How a Misguided Fed Experiment Deepened and Prolonged the Great Recession (Cato Institute, 2018), and The Menace of Fiscal QE (Cato Institute, 2020).

Selgin 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. Selgin has written for numerous scholarly journals, including the British Numismatic Journal; the Economic Journal; the Economic History Review; the Journal of Economic Literature; and the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking; and for popular outlets such as the Christian Science Monitor, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

Selgin holds a BA in economics and zoology from Drew University and a PhD in economics from New York University.

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Featured Book

The Menace of Fiscal QE

As the Federal Reserve struggles to fulfill its mandate in a world of low and falling interest rates, it faces yet another challenge: that of resisting a new threat to its hard‐​won independence. In his brief but systematic study, George Selgin reviews the movement favoring fiscal QE, shows how it threatens both the Fed’s independence and democratic control of government spending, and counters claims that it offers a low‐​cost means for financing such spending.