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Barry Eichengreen
Where America's fiscal debate goes off the rails
By Barry Eichengreen - Nov 13,2021
BERKELEY — The US Congress has just taken an important step toward implementing President Joe Biden’s fiscal plans, by passing a signature $1 trillion infrastructure bill.
Dancing with the debt ceiling
By Barry Eichengreen - Oct 09,2021
BERKELEY — In 2011, when still vice chair of the US Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen reassured her colleagues that drama around the federal government’s debt ceiling “usually turns out to be just theatre”. Theatre of the absurd, one might add.
This SDR allocation must be different
By Barry Eichengreen - Sep 13,2021
BERKELEY — In August, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced, to much fanfare, that its members had reached a historic agreement to issue $650 billion of special drawing rights (SDRs, the Fund’s unit of account) to meet the COVID-19 emergency.
Will central bank digital currencies doom dollar dominance?
By Barry Eichengreen - Aug 11,2021
BERKELEY — August 13-15 marks the 50th anniversary of “the weekend that changed the world”, when US president Richard Nixon suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold at a fixed price and rung down the curtain on the Bretton Woods international monetary system.
The challenge of Big Tech finance
By Barry Eichengreen - Jul 07,2021
 BERKELEY — In 2009, in the midst of the global financial crisis, Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chair, famously observed that the only socially productive financial innovation of the preceding 20 years was the automated teller machine.
The big float
By Barry Eichengreen - Jun 26,2021
BERKELEY — August 15 is not a red-letter day on most calendars. True, August 15, 1969, was the first day of the Woodstock music festival. And the Panama Canal opened to traffic on August 15, 1914.
The logic of effective climate action
By Barry Eichengreen - Jun 15,2021
BERKELEY — In his classic book, “The Logic of Collective Action”, the late great Mancur Olson explained that the hardest policies to implement are those with diffuse benefits and concentrated costs.
Who needs a digital dollar?
By Barry Eichengreen - Apr 04,2021
BERKELEY — The idea of a digital dollar has been in the air for some time now. Recently, it descended from the ether to the lips of US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Federal Reserve (Fed) Chair Jay Powell.
New-model central banks
By Barry Eichengreen - Feb 13,2021
BERKELEY  —  We are used to thinking about the remit of central banks as focusing narrowly on price stability, or at most as targeting inflation while ensuring the smooth operation of the payment system.
An infrastructure inoculation for America’s recovery
By Barry Eichengreen - Jan 19,2021
BERKELEY — With the Democrats’ stunning sweep of Georgia’s two Senate run-off elections handing them control of both houses of Congress as of January 20, the idea of $2,000 stimulus checks for every household is sure to be back on the agenda in the United States.

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