Alex J. Pollock
Alex J. Pollock is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute, and is the co-author of Surprised Again! — The Covid Crisis and the New Market Bubble (2022). Previously he served as the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department (2019-2021), Distinguished Senior Fellow at the R Street Institute (2015-2019 and 2021), Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (2004-2015), and President and CEO, Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago (1991-2004). He is the author of Finance and Philosophy—Why We’re Always Surprised (2018) and Boom and Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (2011), as well as numerous articles and Congressional testimony. Pollock is a graduate of Williams College, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University. His professional and academic work is available on his website.
Alex J. Pollock Articles
Economic freedom should include freedom in money. It’s a freedom even, as we say these days, that advanced economies don’t have. My guiding text for this talk is Friedrich Hayek’s celebrated essay “Choice in Currency.” That is chapter 7 of...
According to a woefully outmoded law of the United States, the American government must account for the more than 8,100 tons of gold it owns at the now completely irrelevant price of $42.22 per ounce.
Since the sixth century BC reign of Croesus of Lydia, refined gold has served as a monetary store of value. Today, many central banks, including the European Central Bank, the Swiss National Bank, the German Bundesbank, the Bank of France...
We are observing a great debate between the US banking regulators who wish to impose new, so-called “Basel III Endgame” rules to significantly increase bank capital, on one side, and the banks who argue they already have more than enough...
The Federal Reserve has officially reported a loss of $57 billion for the first six months of 2023. Quite a number! So the “Federal Reserve Banks Combined Quarterly Financial Report as of June 30, 2023” (CQFR)—a little-known document—is...
