Mehrling Discusses Cryptocurrency and Contemporary Monetary Landscape
In his appearance on City Journal‘s “Risk Talking” podcast, Perry Mehrling, Professor of International Political Economy at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, discusses how understanding the basic features and hierarchy of money can help us understand the cryptocurrency crash of 2022.
In his remarks, Mehrling talks about his “hierarchy of money” and how he uses it as a framework for the global financial system and money, how crypto plays into his frameworks, and why it is on the decline. As central banks undertake experiments to keep economies stable and cryptocurrency innovators launch new products like stablecoins that promise to upend the fiat money system, the question of “what is money” actually gets quite complicated. Despite crypto’s promise to free people from credit and act as a stable alternative to the dollar system, Mehrling argues that its ambition has failed the stress test as an alternative to the established financial order.
The full podcast can be listened to below.
Perry Mehrling is a Professor of International Political Economy at the Pardee School and teaches courses on the economics of money and banking, the history of money and finance, and international money. He is the author of The New Lombard Street: How the Fed became the dealer of last resort (Princeton 2011), Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance (Wiley 2005), and The Money Interest and the Public Interest (Harvard 1997). Recent papers and videos are available on his website, a “one-stop shopping for all things ‘money view.” For more about Professor Mehrling, visit his faculty profile.