Fabio Braggion and Steven Ongena have a post at Vox which looks at corporate leverage and firm-bank relationships in the UK from 1895 to 2009. They document an increase in corporate leverage from c.1970 and a simultaneous increase in firms having multiple relationships with banks. Braggion and Ongena argue that the increase in leverage can be traced to the deregulation of the UK banking system in the early 1970s and the breaking up of the banking cartel. Their working paper is available here.
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.