George Selgin: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yes, you’re on the hook. You can’t get out of that — burn my passport. No, I think that, of course, stablecoins, if they succeed at all, are going to be competing to some extent with banks, and some banks are going to lose to that extent. That in itself can’t be an argument for imposing any kind of restrictions on stablecoins. It has to be the case that the damage banks suffer somehow is going to make us worse off, even though people are benefiting from the stablecoins instead. If we can envision, just for the sake of argument, a stablecoin industry that gives us all everything we want that we used to get from banks, so we do dispense with banks altogether. Well, so what? It’s like replacing horses and buggies with automobiles. So, there has to be some kind of third-party effect or something that’s appealed to before we can say, “Oh, well, we better not let them do this.” I haven’t seen very good arguments about such consequences. I do see evidence to the effect that stablecoins have been very badly managed, because some of them have been disasters. That means we do need to do things to make sure stablecoins are themselves well regulated, but it doesn’t follow that we’re doing this because we want to help the banks. We’re doing it because we want to make sure we have an industry that’s in itself reasonably reliable. For our final segment, we move to the George Selgin production function. George, what is it like owning 100 donkeys?…

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