Traditionally, central banks seeking to stabilize general prices have followed policies similar to those advocated by Knut Wicksell: when prices are higher that desired, raise interest rates to exert downward pressure on prices, and conversely. Despite the historical predominance of interest...

Classical economists David Hume, Pehr Niclas Christiernin, Henry Thornton, David Ricardo, Thomas Attwood, and Robert Torrens looked beyond the redistributive (creditor-debtor) effects of deflationary monetary contraction to its adverse effects on output and employment. They attributed these...

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...

The 1920s and 1930s saw the Fed reject a state-of-the-art empirical policy framework for a logically defective one. Consisting of a quantity theoretic analysis of the business cycle, the former framework featured the money stock, price level, and real interest rates as policy indicators. By...