Please join the MIT Digital Currency Initiative in welcoming Perry Mehrling to the Media Lab for his talk on "A Money View of Stablecoin." 

Abstract:  Many of the computer folk designing crypto think they don't need to know anything about how payments systems work, since they are just going to blow it all up (disrupt) and create something new and better.  But payment systems have developed over millenia, and have been tested repeatedly by financial crises of various kinds.  So let's take that evolutionary wisdom to the most recent creature in the payment zoo.

Bio: 

Mehrling writes about the monetary and financial side of the modern economy, focusing on its global dimensions.

He has four major books: Money and Empire, Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System (Cambridge 2022); The New Lombard Street: How the Fed became the dealer of last resort (Princeton 2011), Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance (Wiley 2005), and The Money Interest and the Public Interest (Harvard 1997).

At Pardee, he teaches courses on global money, at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Outside Pardee, his online course with Coursera (filmed fall 2012) has over the last decade spread the “money view” to a global audience.

He currently serves on the Academic Council of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (New York) and the Committee on Global Thought (Columbia University), and has served as visiting professor at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, the University of Nice, Paris X (Nanterre), and the Sloan School of Management, MIT.

He has a BA from Harvard College, an MSc from London School of Economics, and a PhD from Harvard University.

Professor Mehrling’s areas of expertise include money and banking, political economy, history of monetary and financial thought, and global money.

Follow him on Twitter @PMehrling and visit his personal website for a “one-stop shop for all things ‘money view.’”