At the end of 1930, as the 1929 US stock market crash was starting to have an impact on the real economy in the form of falling commodity prices, falling output, and rising unemployment, John Maynard Keynes, in the concluding chapters of his Treatise on Money, launched a challenge to monetary...

In 1943, Congress faced unpredictably large war expenditures exceeding the prevailing debt limit. Congressional debates from that time contain an insightful discussion of how the increased expenditures could be financed, dealing with practical and theoretical issues that seem to be missing from...

Every crisis reveals unexpected consequences of economic policies. The current euro crisis should be no exception. As European Union governments search for a solution, there are already a number of lessons to be learned. Senior Scholar Jan Kregel outlines the top six.

As the results of the various official investigations spread, it becomes more and more apparent that a large majority of financial institutions engaged in fraudulent manipulation of the benchmark London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) to their own advantage, and that bank management and...

The European Union (EU) is a treaty-based organization that was set up after World War II as a means of putting an end to a favorite practice of the Europeans: sorting out their national differences by engaging in bloody warfare. The European experiment—the formation of a Common Market,...

The Fed's zero interest policy rate (ZIRP) and quantitative easing (QE) policies failed to restore growth to the US economy as expected (i.e., increased investment spending a la John Maynard Keynes or from an expanded money supply a la Ben Bernanke / Milton Friedman). Senior Scholar Jan Kregel...

Criticisms of the Federal Reserve's "unconventional" monetary policy response to the Great Recession have been of two types. On the one hand, the tripling in the size of the Fed's balance sheet has led to forecasts of rampant inflation in the belief that the massive increase in excess reserves...

Given the continuing divergence between progress in the monetary field and political integration in the euro area, the German interest in imposing austerity may be seen as representing an attempt to achieve, de facto, accelerated progress toward political union; progress that has long been...

In March of this year, the government of Cyprus, in response to a banking crisis and as part of a negotiation to secure emergency financial support for its financial system from the European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF), proposed the assessment of a tax on bank deposits,...

Past experience suggests that multifunctional banking is the leading source of financial crisis, while large bank size contributes to contagion and systemic risk. This indicates that resolving large banks will not solve the problems associated with multifunctional banking--a conclusion reached...