Henry Thornton's Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802) established once and for all the notion that central banks have the prime responsibility for controlling the money stock and the price level. This theme and the analytical framework underlying it reappeared in the famous Bullion Report...

The economic crisis that began in 2007 and still lingers has invited comparison with the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has also generated renewed interest in Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's explanation of the latter as mainly the consequence of the Fed's failure as a lender of last...