Narrow banking proposals are fashionable. Here is a selective list of contributions to the debate:

• Cantillon (1755) and Mises (1912) argue that money creation leads to distortions.
• The 100% reserve proposal by Irving Fisher and his colleagues in the 1930s is reviewed by William Allen in the article “Irving Fisher and the 100 Percent Reserve Proposal” (Journal of Law and Economics, 1993). The article covers precursors to the 1930s debate; the March 1933 memorandum by University of Chicago economists; the March 1939 “Program for Monetary Reform;” and Friedman’s “Program for Monetary Stability.” See also Wikipedia on the “Chicago Plan”.
• In 1990, Tyler Cowen and Randal Kroszner wrote an article entitled “Mutual Fund Banking: A Market Approach” in the Cato Journal.
• In the early 2000s, Joseph Huber and James Robertson proposed a “plain money” reform (website with links to various documents). Grass root movements pushing for monetary reform in several countries reference their work.
• On May 14, 2009, Laurence Kotlikoff and John Goodman proposed a system of “Limited Purpose Banking” in New Republic, and in 2010 Kotlikoff published the book “Jimmy Stewart Is Dead: Ending the World’s Ongoing Financial Plague with Limited Purpose Banking.” According to the proposal, “all financial corporations engaged in financial intermediation, including all banks and insurance companies, would function exclusively as middlemen who sell safe as well as risky collections of securities (mutual funds) to the public. They would never, themselves, own financial assets. Thus, they would never be in a position to fail because of ill-advised financial bets.” On July 17, 2010, Tyler Cowen criticised the proposal in a blog post; Kotlikoff responded on August, 3 and Cowen responded in turn on August, 4.
• In August 2012, Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof published an IMF Working Paper entitled “The Chicago Plan Revisited” (revised paper, slides [pages 18–29 display the balance sheet changes]). Benes and Kumhof write in the abstract: “We study [Irving Fisher’s (1936)] claims [about the advantages of the Chicago Plan] 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 …” Benes and Kumhof also argue that the plan eliminates the zero-lower-bound problem (see my post on other proposals to eliminate the zero-lower-bound problem).
• On April 16, 2014, John Cochrane advertised his paper “Toward a Run-Free Financial System” in a blog post. Key points in the paper are: The recent financial crisis involved a systemic run. Accordingly, one should eliminate run-prone securities rather than guaranteeing them and regulating bank assets. Banks should have to back demand deposits, fixed-value money-market funds or overnight debt by short-term treasuries; they would have to finance risky investments from equity or long-term debt. Fully equity-financed banks (that are difficult to resolve) could still be held by downstream institutions that issue debt (and are easy to resolve). Leverage should be regulated by means of Pigouvian taxes rather than quotas and ratios. Modern technology and large public debt stocks render narrow banking feasible: Treasury-backed or floating-value money-market fund shares can be used for payments; risky assets are highly liquid and can easily be sold and bought for transaction purposes.
• On June 3, 2014, the Swiss group “Monetäre Modernisierung” started to collect signatures with the aim to force a national referendum on changes to the Swiss constitution. In the tradition of Joseph Huber’s work, the group aims at abolishing all money except for base money. See my post on the initiative.
• On June 5, 2014, the Economist’s Free Exchange blog covered the narrow banking idea, somewhat sceptically. John Cochrane argued that the post suffered from misconceptions.
• On July 27, 2014, John Cochrane discussed Sheila Bair’s opposition against letting the broader public hold reserves. On August 21 and September 22, 2014, he approvingly discussed (here and here) the Fed’s balance sheet policy from a financial stability perspective. He published another related post on September 17. On November 21, 2014, he interpreted minutes of an FMOC meeting as suggestive evidence of plans to establish segregated cash accounts. These deposit accounts would be backed by central bank reserves. They would be safe and run proof, and the link to (interest paying) reserves would facilitate a rate rise by the Fed.
• In August 2014, Ralph Musgrave published a paper that defends the full reserve banking model against various criticisms.
• In December 2014, Romain Baeriswyl published a paper that discusses narrow banking proposals in light of Cantillon (1755), Mises (1912) and Fisher (1936).

I have discussed pros and cons of narrow banking against the background of the Swiss “Vollgeldinitiative.” The issue of segregated cash accounts connects the narrow banking debate to the debate on government provided electronic money that I discuss in another post.

This post has been updated and extended after the initial publication.