What stands out in retrospect about U.S. monetary policy during the Greenspan Era is the ongoing movement away from mechanistic restrictions on the conduct of policy, together with a willingness on occasion to depart even from what more flexible guidelines dictated by contemporary conventional...

Among the different kinds of economic behavior which may account for the familiar Fisherian relationship between nominal interest rates and expected price inflation, portfolio behavior is the most plausibly flexible in the short run. Since substitution into real assets is not a practical...

Substantial shifts in wealth ownership from individuals to pension funds are currently taking place in the United States and also are in prospect for the foreseeable future. Moreover, pension funds typically exhibit portfolio preferences that are markedly different from those of individuals. In...

Three empirical findings presented in this paper show that evidence based on the most recent U.S. experience does not indicate the kind of close or reliable relationship between money and nonfinancial economic activity that, if present, might warrant basing the design and implementation of...

The threat to monetary policy from the electronic revolution in banking is the possibility of a decoupling' of the operations of the central bank from markets in which financial claims are created and transacted in ways that, at some operative margin, affect the decisions of households and firms...

The object of this essay is to gain an overview of developments in theAmerican financial markets since World War II, with particular attention to changes that have occurred either between the prewar and post-war years or within the past several decades. Inevitably such an effort must be...

Is credit as closely related to income as is money? Results presented in the first half of this paper, based on a variety of methodological approaches, consistently indicate that the aggregate of outstanding credit liabilities of all nonfinancial borrowers in the United States bears as close a...

The experience of costly disinflation in the early 1980s has contradicted the central policy promise of the new classical macroeconomics just as sharply as the experience of accelerating inflation in the l970s contradicted the chief promise of earlier thinking. Much of the attractive appeal of...

This paper argues that the distinctions among different current theories of the business cycle do not have the force usually assumed in their behalf in discussions of macroeconomic policy. The distinction between aggregate demand and aggregate supply as the principal location of the disturbances...

This paper considers the implications, for macroeconomic modeling and for monetary policy, of the interrelationships among money, credit and nonfinancial economic activity. Data for the United States since World War II show that the volume of outstanding credit is as closely related to economic...