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...

Short-term interest rates in the United States have been "too high" since 1979-10 in the sense that both unconditional and conditional forecasts, based on an estimated vector autoregression model summarizing the prior experience, underpredict short-term interest rates during this period....

For expectations of price inflation to affect interest rates, they must affect the behavior of borrowers and lenders or both. This paper analyzes the emergence of the inflation premium in long-term interest rates as the explicit result of borrowers' and lenders' behavior in the bond market in...

How the financing of government budget deficits affects the structure of expected asset returns depends on assets' relative substitutabilities in investors' aggregate portfolio, and these substitutabilities in turn depend on how investors perceive the risks associated with the respective assets'...