I’ve had a ton of fun collaborating with my former professor, Prof. McCallie, on a new website: McCallie on Money.
At the heart of Prof. McCallie’s work is a deceptively simple idea: much of what we call money isn’t actually money, but a claim on it. Just as casino chips stand in for cash, bank deposits and other financial instruments allow people to trade without constantly exchanging actual currency. His Market of Concurrent Trading framework shows how banks and payment systems can facilitate enormous volumes of commerce with relatively little underlying money, and how competition, trust, and the ability to redeem those claims help keep the system in balance. It’s a perspective rooted in classical economics, but one with fascinating implications for everything from modern banking to Bitcoin, stablecoins, and the future of decentralized finance.
Perhaps the most enjoyable part has been the conversations themselves. Working together reminded me of the many hours I spent in Prof. McCallie’s office back at the University of Maine in the late 1990s, discussing economics, markets, and all sorts of interesting ideas. In many ways, this framework feels like a natural extension of those conversations, now applied to both the history of money and economics, but also our modern world of cryptocurrencies and ever-evolving monetary systems.
It’s been a real pleasure picking up those conversations nearly three decades later, and I’m looking forward to helping develop and maintain the site in the years ahead.