Monetarist Perspectives


Book Description

Here is a clear and thoughtful introduction to the current literature of monetary economics and macroeconomics. The book's central theme is a view of the macroeconomy in which recession and inflation are to be interpreted as the result of the economy adjusting to a discrepancy between the quantity of money supplied and the quantity of money demanded, with the latter quantity being determined by a stable aggregate demand function. The author discusses in turn the place of monetarism in macroeconomics, its implications for the interpretation of the short-run demand for money function, its relationship to equilibrium business cycle theory, the disequilibrium transmission mechanism that underlies the monetarist viewpoint, and finally its implications for the policy of âeoegradualism.âe He synthesizes a large body of theoretical and empirical literature, and his empirical observations are broadly based on the experiences of England and Australia as well as Canada and the United States. Each chapter can be read apart from the others, and Laidler has taken particular care to keep the technical level of exposition low without sacrificing much in the way of theoretical sophistication.




Money and the Economy


Book Description




Money, Banking, and the Economy


Book Description

Money, Banking, and the Economy: A Monetarist View presents a systematic "monetarist" approach to money, banking, and the economy. The monetarist approach is a blend of the pre-Keynesian quantity theory, the tradition represented by D. H. Robertson, and the modern monetarist school, represented by Milton Friedman and his followers. A systematic development of a model of nominal income, based upon the Cambridge equation and the loanable funds theory of interest, is presented. This model is applied to the business cycle; inflation and stagflation; balance of payments and foreign exchange rates; and monetary and fiscal policy theories. Comprised of 20 chapters, this book begins with an introduction to the concept of money and its functions and how it contributes to economic instability. The discussion then turns to the new and old definitions of the things that serve as money, the structure and institutions of financial markets and financial instruments; banks, banking markets, and banking regulations; and the money supply process. Subsequent chapters explore the structure and functions of the Federal Reserve System; the problem of implementing monetary policy; the Clower-Leijonhufvud idea of Say's Principle; the quantity theory of money as described by the equation of exchange or the Cambridge equation; and the connection between money and business cycles. The book concludes by describing a monetarist-public choice perspective on the efficacy of monetary and fiscal policies. This monograph will be of value to undergraduate students and economists.




Monetarist Economics


Book Description




Money in Historical Perspective


Book Description

Modern monetary economics has been significantly influenced by the knowledge and insight brought to the field by the work of Anna J. Schwartz, an economist whose career has spanned almost half a century. Her contributions evidence a broad expertise in international history and policy, and an ability to apply the results of her careful historical research to current issues and debates. Money in Historical Perspective is a collection of sixteen of her papers selected by Michael D. Bordo and Milton Friedman. Grouped into three sections, the essays constitute a number of Dr. Schwartz's most cited articles on the subject of monetary economics, many of which are no longer readily accessible. In the papers in part I, dating from 1947 to the present, Dr. Schwartz examines money and banking in the United States and the United Kingdom from a historical perspective. Her investigation of the historical evidence linking economic instability to erratic monetary behavior—this behavior itself a product of discretionary monetary policy—has led her to argue for the importance of stable money, and her writings on these issues over the last two decades form part II. The volume concludes with four recent articles on international monetary arrangements, including Dr. Schwartz's well-known work on the gold standard. This volume of classic essays by Anna Schwartz will be a useful addition to the libraries of scholars and students for its exemplary historical research and commentary on monetary systems.




The Deficit Myth


Book Description

A New York Times Bestseller The leading thinker and most visible public advocate of modern monetary theory -- the freshest and most important idea about economics in decades -- delivers a radically different, bold, new understanding for how to build a just and prosperous society. Stephanie Kelton's brilliant exploration of modern monetary theory (MMT) dramatically changes our understanding of how we can best deal with crucial issues ranging from poverty and inequality to creating jobs, expanding health care coverage, climate change, and building resilient infrastructure. Any ambitious proposal, however, inevitably runs into the buzz saw of how to find the money to pay for it, rooted in myths about deficits that are hobbling us as a country. Kelton busts through the myths that prevent us from taking action: that the federal government should budget like a household, that deficits will harm the next generation, crowd out private investment, and undermine long-term growth, and that entitlements are propelling us toward a grave fiscal crisis. MMT, as Kelton shows, shifts the terrain from narrow budgetary questions to one of broader economic and social benefits. With its important new ways of understanding money, taxes, and the critical role of deficit spending, MMT redefines how to responsibly use our resources so that we can maximize our potential as a society. MMT gives us the power to imagine a new politics and a new economy and move from a narrative of scarcity to one of opportunity.




Raising Keynes


Book Description

Back to the future: a heterodox economist rewrites Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money to serve as the basis for a macroeconomics for the twenty-first century. John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was the most influential economic idea of the twentieth century. But, argues Stephen Marglin, its radical implications were obscured by Keynes's lack of the mathematical tools necessary to argue convincingly that the problem was the market itself, as distinct from myriad sources of friction around its margins. Marglin fills in the theoretical gaps, revealing the deeper meaning of the General Theory. Drawing on eight decades of discussion and debate since the General Theory was published, as well as on his own research, Marglin substantiates Keynes's intuition that there is no mechanism within a capitalist economy that ensures full employment. Even if deregulating the economy could make it more like the textbook ideal of perfect competition, this would not address the problem that Keynes identified: the potential inadequacy of aggregate demand. Ordinary citizens have paid a steep price for the distortion of Keynes's message. Fiscal policy has been relegated to emergencies like the Great Recession. Monetary policy has focused unduly on inflation. In both cases the underlying rationale is the false premise that in the long run at least the economy is self-regulating so that fiscal policy is unnecessary and inflation beyond a modest 2 percent serves no useful purpose. Fleshing out Keynes's intuition that the problem is not the warts on the body of capitalism but capitalism itself, Raising Keynes provides the foundation for a twenty-first-century macroeconomics that can both respond to crises and guide long-run policy.




The Money Illusion


Book Description

The first book-length work on market monetarism, written by its leading scholar. Is it possible that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong? It’s happened before. Just as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz led the economics community in the 1960s to reevaluate its view of what caused the Great Depression, the same may be happening now to our understanding of the first economic crisis of the 21st century. Foregoing the usual relitigating of problems such as housing markets and banking crises, renowned monetary economist Scott Sumner argues that the Great Recession came down to one thing: nominal GDP, the sum of all nominal spending in the economy, which the Federal Reserve erred in allowing to plummet. The Money Illusion is an end-to-end case for this school of thought, known as market monetarism, written by its leading voice in economics. Based almost entirely on standard macroeconomic concepts, this highly accessible text lays the groundwork for a simple yet fundamentally radical understanding of how monetary policy can work best: providing a stable environment for a market economy to flourish.




New Perspectives in Monetary Macroeconomics


Book Description

"The defining characteristic of the monetary and financial systems of the capitalist economies since the 1960s has been persistent and fundamental change. Some indicators of this change include the patterns toward financial deregulation, historically high interest rates, and increasingly frequent and severe bouts of financial instability. The essays in this book build from the contributions of Hyman P. Minsky, whose theories in the areas of monetary macroeconomics, unlike those of nearly all practitioners in this field, have sought to understand the processes of structural change and instabilities as inherent features of capitalist economies." "New Perspectives in Monetary Macroeconomics includes essays that explore the nature of Keynesian uncertainty and the systematic sources of financial instability; empirical essays that consider, among other topics, instability in the contemporary international economy, the Latin American debt crisis, the Great Depression, and the political forces influencing central banks; and essays in analytic history that consider the connections between Minsky's work and that of Schumpeter, Marx, and the Sraffian school." "The book's overall contribution advances thinking in four interrelated areas: how financial factors play a central role in establishing the pace and direction of real investment; how financial fragility emerges through endogenous market practices; how money and credit are generated endogenously through financial market activity rather than simply through prior saving and central bank interventions; and how financial markets are an important site of inter- and intra-class conflict, especially as manifested through the policies of central banks and other important governmental institutions."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved




The Development of Monetary Economics


Book Description

The literature of monetary economics has been characterised by controversy and changes in the received wisdom throughout its history. The controversies have related not merely to the effects on incomes and prices of changes in the money supply, but even to the question of whether causality runs from money to incomes and prices or vice versa. This book begins with the pioneering work of the sixteenth century French writer Jean Bodin, followed by the celebrated John Law, and John Locke (and his eighteenth century critics). It considers both the theory and the evidence involved in the controversy between the Currency and Banking schools. Closely related to this was the work of two writers, Thomas Joplin and Walter Bagehot, both of whom provided perspectives strikingly different from those of the main controversialists and, in so doing, advanced the subject of monetary economics. The book seeks, through the examination of monetary controversies, to provide an historical perspective on modern understanding of monetary policy. It will be essential reading for economists with an interest in monetary economics and the history of economic thought.