Folks, I don't wish to be perceived as arguing that zero banking oversight is ideal, or that any U.S. state ever practiced it. Nor do I claim any other nation ever did. 1/n https://twitter.com/LevMenand/status/1273251716964716544

What I do claim is that, to see plural note issue arrangements that were both more genuinely free than any U.S. "free" banking system, and ones that worked very well, one has to look beyond the U.S. Drawing on U.S. experience alone can be very misleading....2/n

And that's all the more so when that experience is itself misunderstood, as it is, for example, when U.S.-style "free banking" is confused with unregulated (or little-regulated) banking, or when "wildcat" banks are said to have been common, or 3/n

when the causes, extent, and persistence of state banknote discounts, or the reasons for the lack of such on national bank notes, are misconceived, or when pre-Fed crisis are blamed on "the lack of a central bank" instead of being traced to their fundamental causes. 4/n

I'm going to follow-this with a thread pointing to some other works I and others have written addressing some of these points. (End.)