This paper advances three fundamental propositions regarding money: (1) As R. W. Clower (1965) famously put it, money buys goods and goods buy money, but goods do not buy goods. (2) Money is always debt; it cannot be a commodity from the first proposition because, if it were, that would mean...

The subprime financial crisis has forced several North American and European central banks to take extraordinary measures and to modify some of their operational procedures. These changes have made even clearer the deficiencies and lack of realism in mainstream monetary theory, as can be found...

The New-Keynesian Taylor-Rule model of inflation determination with no role for money is incomplete. As Cochrane (2007a) argues, it has no credible mechanism for ruling out bubbles and as a result fails to provide a reason for private agents to pick a unique stable path. We propose a way...