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Journal Article
An appropriate international currency - gold, dollars, or SDRs?
Discussion Paper
Crisis Chronicles: The Man on the Twenty-Dollar Bill and the Panic of 1837
President Andrew Jackson was a 'hard money' man. He saw specie--that is, gold and silver--as real money, and considered paper money a suspicious store of value fabricated by corrupt bankers. So Jackson issued a decree that purchases of government land could only be made with gold or silver. And just as much as Jackson loved hard money, he despised the elites running the banking system, so he embarked on a crusade to abolish the Second Bank of the United States (the Bank). Both of these efforts by Jackson boosted the demand for specie and revealed the soft spots in an economy based on hard ...
Discussion Paper
Crisis Chronicles: Defensive Suspension and the Panic of 1857
Sometimes the world loses its bearings and the best alternative is a timeout. Such was the case during the Panic of 1857, which started when a prestigious bank in New York City collapsed, making all banks suddenly suspect. Banks, fearing a run on their gold reserves, started calling in loans from commercial firms and brokers, leading to asset sales at fire-sale prices and bankruptcies. By mid-October, banks in Philadelphia and New York suspended convertibility, meaning they would not allow gold to be withdrawn from their vaults even while all other banking services continued. Suspension then ...
Discussion Paper
Crisis Chronicles: The Gold Panic of 1869, America’s First Black Friday
Wall Street in the late 1860s was a bare-knuckles affair plagued by robber barons, political patronage, and stock manipulation. In perhaps the most scandalous instance of manipulation ever, a cabal led by Jay Gould, a successful but ruthless railroad executive and speculator, and several highly placed political contacts, conspired to corner the gold market. Although ultimately foiled, they succeeded in bankrupting several venerable brokerage houses and crashing the stock market, causing America?s first Black Friday.
Working Paper
Implied volatility from options on gold futures: do statistical forecasts add value or simply paint the lilly?
Consistent with findings in other markets, implied volatility is a biased predictor of the realized volatility of gold futures. No existing explanation?including a price of volatility risk?can completely explain the bias, but much of this apparent bias can be explained by persistence and estimation error in implied volatility. Statistical criteria reject the hypothesis that implied volatility is informationally efficient with respect to econometric forecasts. But delta hedging exercises indicate that such econometric forecasts have no incremental economic value. Thus, statistical measures of ...
Working Paper
A model of bimetallism
Bimetallism has been the subject of considerable debate: Was it a viable monetary system? Was it a desirable system? In our model, the (exogenous and stochastic) amount of each metal can be split between monetary uses to satisfy a cash-in-advance constraint, and nonmonetary uses in which the stock of uncoined metal yields utility. The ratio of the monies in the cash-in-advance constraint is endogenous. Bimetallism is feasible: we find a continuum of steady states (in the certainty case) indexed by the constant exchange rate of the monies; we also prove existence for a range of fixed exchange ...
Working Paper
Can government gold be put to better use?: Qualitative and quantitative policies
Gold has both private uses (depletion uses and service uses) and government uses. It can be obtained from mines with high extraction costs (about $300 per ounce) or from above ground stocks with no extraction costs. Governments still store massive stocks of gold. Making government gold available for private uses through some combination of sales and loans raises welfare from private uses by removing two types of inefficiencies. For given private uses, there is a production inefficiency if costless government gold is withheld while costly gold is taken from mines. There are use inefficiencies ...
Journal Article
Monetary effects of the treasury sale of gold
Journal Article
Economic history : Gold among the 'Heels
News of gold discoveries pulled in experts, captains of industry, money, and miners to the sleepy backwater that was early 19th century North Carolina.
Journal Article
Federal Reserve : An anchor of gold : how the gold standard works in theory and practice
Related links : https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/richmondfedorg/publications/research/econ_focus/2010/q2/federal_reserve_weblinks.cfm