This paper outlines a model of the first true central bank, the Bank of Amsterdam, founded in 1609. Employing a variant of the Freeman (1996) model of money and payments, we first analyze the problematic monetary situation in the Netherlands prior to the founding of the Bank. We then use the...

The subprime financial crisis has forced several North American and European central banks to take extraordinary measures and to modify some of their operational procedures. These changes have made even clearer the deficiencies and lack of realism in mainstream monetary theory, as can be found...

This paper estimates and compares the full participation and the segmented markets monetary frameworks. In both models, the real sector and monetary policy determine exogenously the joint process for the aggregate endowment and the short-term nominal interest rate, while the money growth rate...

While both public and private financial agencies supply asset markets with large quantities of information, they do not necessarily disclose all asset-related information to the general public. This observation leads us to ask what principles might govern the optimal disclosure policy for an...

A government can promote the use of an object as the general medium of exchange by accepting it in tax payments. I prove this old claim in a dynamic model and compare the mechanism to convertibility. The government can often keep its favourite money in circulation even while increasing its...

This paper first examines two approaches to money adopted by Keynes in the General Theory (GT). The first is the more familiar supply and demand equilibrium approach of Chapter 13 incorporated within conventional macroeconomics in both the ISLM version as well as Friedman's monetarism. Indeed,...

An extensive literature in monetary theory has emphasized the role of money as a record-keeping device. Money assumes this role in situations where using credit would be too costly, and some might argue that this role will diminish as the cost of information, and thus the cost of credit-based...

Classical models of money are typically based on a competitive market without capital or credit. They then impose exogenous timing structures, market participation constraints, or cash-in-advance constraints to make money essential. We present a simple model without credit where money arises...

This paper advances three fundamental propositions regarding money: (1) As R. W. Clower (1965) famously put it, money buys goods and goods buy money, but goods do not buy goods. (2) Money is always debt; it cannot be a commodity from the first proposition because, if it were, that would mean...