An economy is in a liquidity trap when monetary policy cannot influence either real or nominal variables of interest. A necessary condition for this is that the short nominal interest rate is constrained by its lower bound, typically zero. The paper considers two small analytical models, one...

The paper considers ways of avoiding a liquidity trap and ways of getting out of one. Unless lower short nominal interest rates are associated with significantly lower interest volatility, a lower average rate of inflation, which will be associated with lower expected nominal interest rates,...

The paper answers three questions.(1) Does it matter if a central bank suffers a large capital loss? (2) Can the central bank become insolvent? (3) When, how and by whom should the central bank be recapitalised?

Several recent studies imply that the response of national saving to fiscal policy is non-monotonic. In this paper, we use two data sets to search for the circumstances in which such non-monotonic responses arise: one refers to a sample of OECD countries, as in previous studies, and one to a...

Governments through the ages have appropriated resources through the monopoly of the ‘coinage’. In modern fiat money economies, the monopoly of the issue of legal tender is generally assigned to an agency of the state, the Central Bank, which may have varying degrees of operational and...

The Paper provides a formalization of the monetary economics folk proposition that government fiat money is an asset of the holder (the private sector) but not a liability of the issuer (the state). Money is 'net wealth' in the limited sense that, after consolidation of the intertemporal budget...