End The Fed? A Soho Forum Debate

Resolution: "Replacing the Federal Reserve with free-market institutions would significantly improve the economy's money, banking, and financial systems."

For the affirmative:
Lawrence H. White is Professor of Economics at George Mason University. His forthcoming book Better Money: Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin? (Cambridge University Press, 2023) compares and contrasts alternative monetary standards. Best known for his work on market-based monetary systems, White is also author of Free Banking in Britain (1984; 2nd ed. 1995), Competition and Currency (1989), and The Theory of Monetary Institutions (1999), and co-editor of Renewing the Search for a Monetary Constitution (2015). His research has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, the Economic History Review, and other leading economics journals. He is a Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute and a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Mercatus Center.

For the negative:
Frederic Mishkin is the Alfred Lerner Professor of Banking and Financial Institutions at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and from September 2006 to August 2008 was a member (governor) of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He has also been a Senior Fellow at the FDIC Center for Banking Research, and past President of the Eastern Economic Association. From 1994 to 1997 he was Executive Vice President and Director of Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and an associate economist of the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve System. Professor Mishkin's research focuses on monetary policy and its impact on financial markets and the aggregate economy.