Paul Krugman's essay "Who Was Milton Friedman?" seriously mischaracterizes Friedman's economics and his legacy. In this paper we provide a rejoinder to Krugman on these issues. In the course of setting the record straight, we provide a self-contained guide to Milton Friedman's impact on modern...

By the early 1960s, outstanding U.S. dollar liabilities began to exceed the U.S. gold stock, suggesting that the United States could not completely maintain its pledge to convert dollars into gold at the official price. This raised uncertainty about the Bretton Woods parity grid, and speculation...

If official interventions convey private information useful for price discovery in foreign-exchange markets, then they should have value as a forecast of near-term exchange-rate movements. Using a set of standard criteria, we show that approximately 60 percent of all U.S. foreign-exchange...

Foreign-exchange operations did not end after the United States stopped its activist approach to intervention. Japan persisted in such operations, but avoided overt conflict with its monetary policy. With the on-set of the Great Recession, Switzerland has transacted in foreign exchange both for...

In this paper we examine the evidence for two competing views of how monetary and financial disturbances influenced the real economy during the national banking era, 1880-1914. According to the monetarist view, monetary disturbances affected the real economy through changes on the liability side...

We present historical examples of new forms of money that can be com- pared with the ECU. We first define the ECU in its official role before turning to developments in the private market for ECUs. We then examine historical antecedents of three attributes of ECUs: a unit of account; a basket of...

Monetary policy regimes encompass the constraints or limits imposed by custom, institutions and nature on the ability of the monetary authorities to influence the evolution of macroeconomic aggregates. This paper surveys the historical experience of both international and domestic (national)...

Our paper examines Charles Goodhart's work on the history of monetary institutions: central bank operations under the gold standard, their behaviour in relation to the financial system in which they functioned, including their responses to banking crises, and their performance as lenders of last...

David Laidler has been a major player in the development of the monetarist tradition. As the monetarist approach lost influence on policy makers he kept defending the importance of many of its principles. In this paper we survey and assess the impact on monetary economics of Laidler's work on...

It is controversial whether money stock targeting without base drift (i.e. following a trend-stationary growth path) makes the price level more predictable in the presence of permanent shocks to money demand. Developing a procedure that does not run into the Lucas critique, and applying this...