In the business cycle literature of the inter-war years, the role of the interest rate in coordinating, or failing to co-ordinate, agents' choices about the allocation of resources over time was an important theme, to which Axel Leijonhufvud (1981) gave the name "the Wicksell connection". The...

It is important to keep two closely related distinctions in mind when discussing the microeconomics of money: that between the social arrangement known as monetary exchange, and those assets known as money; and that between what Patinkin (1957) called the market experiment and individual experiment.

It was remarked at the outset of this paper that, in the 1920s,there existed a vigorous, diverse, and distinctly American literature dealing with monetary economics and the business cycle.