Credit cycle and monetary policy: John Rogers Commons as a ‘monetarist’

Commons sketches an institutionalist theory of property based on debt, that is a potential of expected income, and the vector of which is the monetary system. His monetary theory of the credit cycle inspires from Wicksell and Fisher’s debt-deflation theory, rather than from Fisher’s quantity theory. According to Commons, the Central Bank is the key institution, whose role is to lead an active policy controlling the quantity of money based on the management of interest rates. Commons may be considered as a “monetarist,” who rejects both the gold standard rule and the real bills doctrine.