SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: Institutional Subscriptions are here! Get Your Academic Library or Business to Subscribe

Over the years I’ve gotten inquiries about taking on institutional subscriptions. Those requests have come from both academics and employees at for-profit businesses- Institutional subscriptions mean that a firm or a library would sign up on behalf of their employees, students or simply their patrons. I have had a few generous institutions move forward ad hoc, in the past. But overall I have not been able to support such subscriptions. Today that changes. Now institutions can subscribe and provide access to Notes on the Crises.

A stable base of institutional subscriptions would also allow me to continue to engage in-depth, and long form research that is difficult to be compensated any other way. Not that the flow of paid pieces will not continue to go up — I have such a tremendous backlog of archival material that I want to share. I also want to continue providing contemporary economic coverage, like my Election piece last Friday. But it remains the case that scrutinizing the Federal Reserve with Freedom of Information Act Requests, or getting 1000s of pages of documents from the National Archives, is slow and difficult work. Building the database of 30,000 pages of Federal Reserve Board minutes involved a tremendous amount of effort and I want to continue to expand this database. For one thing, I want to get the Federal Reserve Board minutes for subsequent years and I want to continue to make these documents freely and publicly accessible.

The results of these intensive efforts are seen as important by many thousands of people, but I understand not everyone has the means to back this research for what it’s worth. Thankfully, institutional subscriptions provide another way! Here’s how you can help Notes On The Crises:

If you’re an academic who’s ever gotten something out of reading my writing, please recommend that your college/university’s library take out an institutional subscription. Emphasize the usefulness of the newsletter.  Mention the many thousands of pages of unique documents I have uncovered and will continue to uncover & its usefulness to your own research. If you’re a grad student or undergraduate, your recommendations matter as well. Do you have other friends who also get a lot from Notes? Asking in the same week will get better results! Suggestions to a professor will also be very helpful.

If you’re in the private sector — especially at a law firm or a financial institution of some kind  —recommend a subscription to your employer. If you’re the boss, just take out a subscription yourself! For most of these types of businesses an annual institutional subscription to Notes on the Crises would be a rounding error of a rounding error. The memos I got last year related to what the Fed would do if the treasury defaulted are by themselves quite impactful & have all sorts of implications for financial institutions and the broader economy. 

For all that I’ve put out already, there is so much work that goes on behind the scenes that readers do not see- or have not seen yet. I’ve filed a number of FOIA appeals and have had partial success with them— but that means submitting 100s of FOIA requests and then submitting appeals — which themselves require research and argumentation. This is painstaking work. But also invaluable: for example, I have been fighting a nearly year long fight to get access to the Treasury letter indemnifying the Federal Reserve for handling Nazi Gold. In the process, I’ve developed a unique set of legal arguments which have broader implications for the world of FOIA. 

The more I turn over, the more there is to explore further. I’ve had more successes than most people could keep track of already, but the fight continues. This is where I need your help. Institutions are best placed to support such long, drawn out efforts.

If you have ever accessed academic journals through a library online, you know how this works. You punch in your library login, when you click through to use your library login information. Then, a long and complicated proxy URL appears. When I use my New York Public Library Card to access a Journal like the Journal of Pension Economics & Finance, I get access through a URL that looks like:

“https://www-cambridge-org.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/core/journals/journal-of-pension-economics-and-finance”

In this manner an institution like an academic library (or a private firm) can provide individual users the ability to login and read a specific publication through a proxy IP address. Now, Notes on the Crises can be accessed the same way!

Since I need IP information from institutions in order to set up the proxy logins, I’m not going to list institutional subscriptions through the subscription portal. Instead, please have the relevant person/people at your institution email me at [email protected]. Then I can generate an invoice page at Stripe.com where payment information can be filled out. I’ll then provide the relevant technical information. I’m charging the same price to all institutions ($2500) but an institution can of course generously choose to pay more.

Institutional subscribers are recognized based on their IP addresses. Each institution will need to provide a list of subnets (IP address ranges) that their traffic will come from, so that the server can recognize traffic originating at that institution. Please have your librarian, research or information technology (IT) department contact me, so that I can add the IP address ranges (preferably in the form of what’s called a “netblock”), and ensure that individuals with institutional access can successfully gain access to premium pieces.

Thank you for your time and please, spread this announcement far and wide!