This essay examines Keynes' views on banking behaviour and the relationships between central banks and banks as they evolved from his Tract on Monetary Reform to The General Theory. The objective is to clarify in what sense money may be exogenous in his final work. We identify a distinctly...

This paper assesses the contribution of the European Central Bank (ECB) to Germany’s ongoing economic crisis, a vicious circle of decline in which the country has become stuck since the early 1990s. It is argued that the ECB continues the Bundesbank tradition of asymmetric policymaking: the...

This paper assesses the ECB’s performance, which the author finds to be seriously lacking but which is of paramount importance to understanding euroland’s ongoing stagnation and fragility. A main finding is that the series of policy blunders which characterized the bank’s conduct features...

This paper argues that important independent causes of European weakness, in addition to U.S. strength, were involved in producing the stark growth differential between the euro area and U.S. economies widely held to have caused euro weakness. The paper scrutinizes the role of European monetary...

Though the worst of the financial crisis of 2008 has, with hope, ebbed, it has forever changed the economy in the United States and throughout the rest of the world. Using the financial and economic crisis as a catalyst, this volume examines how to better regulate the financial system and what...

This essay analyses the core proposition of loanable funds theory that changes in technology and time preferences directly and immediately affect interest rates. Applying what may be seen as a generalised financial-buffers approach to the analysis of disequilibrium, we find that loanable funds...

This essay offers a fresh interpretation of Keynes's 'finance motive.' Some competing interpretations are assessed, which, it is argued, are inconsistent with the conceptual framework of Keynes's monetary analysis. The finance motive is interpreted as an intrinsically dynamic conception, which...

Conventional wisdom blames Germany's ongoing economic and fiscal crisis on the unification shock of the early 1990s and structural problems in labour markets. Challenging this view, this paper offers a fresh assessment that focuses on macroeconomic demand management. It is shown that Germany's...

This paper investigates the (re-)establishment of central banking in West Germany after 1945 and the history of the Bundesbank Act of 1957. The main focus is on the early emphasis on central bank independence, which at the time represented a German peculiarity. The paper inquires whether...