It is commonplace to speak of central bank "independence" as if it were both a reality and a necessity. While the Federal Reserve is subject to the "dual mandate", it has substantial discretion in its interpretation of the vague call for high employment and low inflation. Most important, the...

While the mainstream long argued that the central bank could use quantitative constraints as a means to controlling the private creation of money, most economists now recognize that the central bank can only set the overnight interest ratewhich has only an indirect impact on the quantity of...

Walter Bagehot's putative principles of lending in liquidity crises - to lend freely to solvent banks with good collateral but at penalty rates - have served as a theoretical basis for thinking about the lender of last resort for close to 100 years, while simultaneously providing justification...

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...

The global financial crisis has now spread across multiple countries and sectors, affecting both financial and real spheres in the advanced as well as the developing economies. This has been caused by policies based on "rational expectation" models that advocate deregulated finance, with...

In this paper, I examine whether Hyman P. Minsky adopted an endogenous money approach in his early work - at the time that he was first developing his financial instability approach. In an earlier piece (Wray 1992), I closely examined Minsky's published writings to support the argument that,...

This would seem an opportune moment to reshape banking systems in the Americas. But any effort to rethink and improve banking must acknowledge three major barriers. The first is a crisis of vision: there has been too little consideration of what kind of banking system would work best for...

This paper examines the fiscal and monetary policy options available to China as a sovereign currency-issuing nation operating in a dollar standard world. We first summarize a number of issues facing China, including the possibility of slower growth, global imbalances, and a number of domestic...

For the past decade, the U.S. economy has been driven not by industrial investment but by a real estate bubble. Although the United States may seem to be the leading example of industrial capitalism, its economy is no longer based mainly on investing in capital goods to employ labor to produce...