QUCEH is today hosting the 2014 European Association for Banking and Financial History New Scholars Workshop - the line-up is here and the papers are available here. The workshop is for PhD students working in finance and financial history. I'm particularly looking forward to a paper by Queen's Will Quinn on what moved the nineteenth-century stock-market and Geraldine David's paper on art as a safe-haven investment during the First World War.
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.