James Pennington's creativity as a scientific economist is matched only by his obscurity. He exemplifies the pioneering innovator who never gets his due recognition. Alone and with others he launched (1) the idea that checking deposits are money just like coin and notes, (2) the theory of the...

This paper revisits Keynes's liquidity preference theory as it evolved from the Treatise on Money to The General Theory and after, with a view of assessing the theory's ongoing relevance and applicability to issues of both monetary theory and policy. Contrary to the neoclassical "special case"...

This paper provides a look into what Lucas meant by the term ‘analogue systems’ and how he conceived making them useful. It is argued that any model with remarkable predictive success can be regarded as an analogue system, the term is thus neutral in terms of usefulness. To be useful Lucas...

This introductory paper offers a look into the intellectual and technical progress that led Robert E. Lucas to his seminal paper entitled Expectations and the neutrality of money. It is argued that the neutrality paper applies the capital-theoretic approach of Lucas’s firm microeconomics of...

The monetary economy has properties that cannot be analyzed using the tools of today's dynamic general equilibrium analysis. Keynes's economics, far from being an aberration in the otherwise orderly evolution of modern macroeconomics from Adam Smith's ideas about the "invisible hand", was a...

The monetary economy has properties that cannot be analyzed using the tools of today's dynamic general equilibrium analysis. Keynes's economics, far from being an aberration in the otherwise orderly evolution of modern macroeconomics from Adam Smith's ideas about the "invisible hand," was a...

Henry Thornton (1760-1815), whose major work - An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain - is celebrating its bicentennary in 2002, is considered today to be one of the most prominent classical monetary economist, in particular with regard to its seminal...

Aristotle, followed by Augustine, Aquinas, and Adam Smith, recognized, to a lesser or greater degree, that the ownership and control of private property (wealth, money, riches) is an initial, necessary condition to be able to put one's self in a position to help others in need. A person is or...

In the eighteenth century, a fierce political debate broke out in Sweden about the causes of an extraordinary depreciation of the currency. More specifically, the deteriorating value of the Swedish currency was discretionarily blamed on monetary causes, e.g. the overissuing of banknotes, or...

IT progress and its application to the financial industry have inspired central banks and academics to reflect about the merits of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) accessible to the broad public. This paper first briefly recalls the advantages that have been associated with CBDC and...