The usual description of Keynes's macroeconomics as relying on the postulate of money wage stickiness to explain unemployment, and advocating fiscal policy as its cure, is largely mythical. Rather he was concerned with exploring the theoretical idea that an economy co- ordinated by monetary...

This paper briefly discusses why a monetary policy framework that emphasises interest rates has become standard in recent years, and why so many economists have been persuaded simultaneously to downgrade the importance of monetary aggregates. Then it describes Michael Woodford's particular...

Knut Wickwell's "pure credit economy" and Michael Woodford's "cashless economy" have much in common whereas Wickwell's model was developed in order to extend an already existing theoretical framewok, Woodford's is presented as constituting, in and of itself, a foundation for the theory 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...

Milton Friedman's contributions to and influence on macroeconomics are discussed, beginning with his work on the consumption function and the demand for money, not to mention monetary history, which helped to undermine the post World War 2 "Keynesian" consensus in the area. His inter-related...

In Canada, targeting the inflation rate was intended as a temporary measure during a transition to price-level stability, but became a well-established monetary policy regime in its own right. This paper analyses the role of the interaction of economic ideas with the experience generated by...

[Eliminating history from economic thought] Formal analysis, in which maximizing agents use today's 'true' model of the economy to form expectation upon which they then base their behaviour, trivializes the role of the future in economic life and ignores the possibility that the past's models,...