This paper examines the implications of the experience with the financial crisis of August 2007 for fiscal policy and the use made of it. We briefly sketch the changing attitudes toward fiscal policy and the demise of arbitrary rules for the budget deficits and the reassertion of purposeful...

Relevant economic literature frequently focuses on the impact of credit shocks on housing prices. The macroeconomic doctrine of the new consensus macroeconomics completely ignores bank credit. However, the Great Recession has highlighted the importance of bank credit. The purpose of this article...

The causes of the "great inflation" of the sixteenth century have long been the subject of controversy. Since some major work in the 1930s, historians have argued over a "monetary" and a "real" interpretation. What we show in this paper is, first, that there was a dissenting opinion even then;...

The Bank of England's report on its approach to macroeconomic modeling reveals the underlying structure of their macroeconomic model used for policy purposes. A simplified representation of the Bank of England model is presented, which is less disaggregated than the original model and focuses on...

Current economic policy upgrades monetary policy and downgrades fiscal policy. Monetary policy involves the manipulation of the central bank interest rate, with the specific objective of achieving the main goal of monetary policy, which is, in most cases, the inflation rate. Fiscal policy should...

This paper engages the last testimony of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, Alan Greenspan, before a joint session of Congress in July 2005. It identifies nine areas we relate to the arguments of John Kenneth Galbraith, summarized in his recent contribution, The Economics of Innocent...

This paper attempts to quantify the U.S. housing market slump and its likely impact on consumption. In doing so, it bypasses the traditional approach that suggests that there is no nationwide housing market but a compendium of segmented markets. The paper is not an exercise in forecasting but an...

Recent developments in macroeconomic policy, both in terms of theory and practice, have elevated monetary policy while fiscal policy has been downgraded. Monetary policy has focused on the setting of interest rates as the key policy instrument, along with the adoption of inflation targets and...