Regulation seems to cause bank crises, not prevent them

City AM's Pete Spence (formerly of this parish) reminded me of Mark Carney's claims in January that free banking systems are more unstable than regulated ones. I'm not so sure. Take a look at these two charts from George Selgin's Are Banking Crises Free-Market Phenomena?, which mark an x for every instance of a banking panic. The first chart is for unfree systems, the second for free systems:

In this case at least, it looks like the evidence is against Mark Carney.

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This is why the nef is known as not economics frankly*

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In which I have to explain something to George Monbiot. Again