At the height of the Great Depression a number of leading U.S. economists advanced a proposal for monetary reform that became known as the Chicago Plan. It envisaged the separation of the monetary and credit functions of the banking system, by requiring 100% reserve backing for deposits. Irving Fisher (1936) claimed the following advantages for this plan: (1) Much better control of a major source of business cycle fluctuations, sudden increases and contractions of bank credit and of the supply of bank-created money. (2) Complete elimination of bank runs. (3) Dramatic reduction of the (net) public debt. (4) Dramatic reduction of private debt, as money creation no longer requires simultaneous debt creation. We study these claims by embedding a comprehensive and carefully calibrated model of the banking system in a DSGE model of the U.S. economy. We find support for all four of Fisher's claims. Furthermore, output gains approach 10 percent, and steady state inflation can drop to zero without posing problems for the conduct of monetary policy.

This work presents a comprehensive history and evaluation of the role of the 100 percent reserve plan in the banking legislation of the New Deal reform era from its inception in 1933 to its re-emergence in the current financial reform debate in the US.

Account planning is a discipline that combines aspects of four traditionally separate areas of advertising and marketing. This text aims to demonstrate how to use account planning to win clients and produce better, more effective advertising. It also shows the role account planning played in producing celebrated advertising campaigns.

In this stirring manifesto, public intellectual, librarian, and philosopher Gorman addresses head on the “existential panic” among library professionals caused by the radical shift in how libraries are viewed.

Now considered a dysfunctional mess, Chicago’s public housing projects once had long waiting lists of would-be residents hoping to leave the slums behind. So what went wrong? To answer this complicated question, D. Bradford Hunt traces public housing’s history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley’s Plan for Transformation. In the process, he chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority’s own transformation from the city’s most progressive government agency to its largest slumlord. Challenging explanations that attribute the projects’ decline primarily to racial discrimination and real estate interests, Hunt argues that well-intentioned but misguided policy decisions—ranging from design choices to maintenance contracts—also paved the road to failure. Moreover, administrators who fully understood the potential drawbacks did not try to halt such deeply flawed projects as Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes. These massive high-rise complexes housed unprecedented numbers of children but relatively few adults, engendering disorder that pushed out the working class and, consequently, the rents needed to maintain the buildings. The resulting combination of fiscal crisis, managerial incompetence, and social unrest plunged the CHA into a quagmire from which it is still struggling to emerge. Blueprint for Disaster, then,is an urgent reminder of the havoc poorly conceived policy can wreak on our most vulnerable citizens.

Irving Fisher's (1935) classic "100% Money" and the "Chicago Plan" are offering solutions to current problems, are revisited, discussed and critiqued. At the time of publication (March 2015), the Greek national debt and the currency of the Euro Area are in issue. National Debts are incurred by misconceived, if not corrupt, ministers of finance and bureaucrats at their central banks, yielding to private commercial bankers who are creating the money out of nothing. The national debts can be repaid at a stroke of a pen, instead are resulting in needless austerity programs, currency failures, leftist governments and noisy demonstrations on the streets, instead of taking back the banks' illicit money creation in violation of generally accepted accounting principles and concepts of IFRS, and giving it back to the people. Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof (2012), both economic researchers at the IMF, have run Irving Fisher's 100% monetary system through carefully calibrated models and found support for each of Fisher's beneficial claims: (1) Smooth business cycles; (2) Stable banks; (3) No national debt(s); (4) Stable debt-free money supply created by a public authority instead of private banks. The tests revealed an additional benefit: (5) A 10% national output gain with zero inflation.

The Toolbox Revisited is a data essay that follows a nationally representative cohort of students from high school into postsecondary education, and asks what aspects of their formal schooling contribute to completing a bachelor's degree by their mid-20s. The universe of students is confined to those who attended a four-year college at any time, thus including students who started out in other types of institutions, particularly community colleges.