This week's Economist has a special essay on financial crises, which argues that financial systems are not just prone to crises, but that they are shaped by them. The big punchline in the essay is that government plays too large a role in financial systems, which actually makes them more unstable. In Banking in Crisis, my forthcoming book, I argue that this is only a part of the explanation as to why banking systems are prone to crises.
According to Robert Shiller , speaking at Davos, Bitcoin is a perfect example of a bubble - story here . Shiller sees Bitcoin as a backwards step in the evolution of money. George Selgin , a free banker, takes an opposing view - click here . Although he doesn't believe that Bitcoin is money, he sees its development as a fascinating turn in the evolution of money. In particular, he lauds the fact that Bitcoin production is constrained and cannot be infinite. There is a short video below where Bitcoin explain how it works.