As the crisis in Europe spreads, policymakers trot out one inadequate proposal after another, all failing to address the core problem. The possibility of dissolution, whether complete or partial, is looking less and less farfetched. Alongside political obstacles to reform, there is a widespread...

From the very start, the European Monetary Union (EMU) was set up to fail. The host of problems we are now witnessing, from the solvency crises on the periphery to the bank runs in Spain, Greece, and Italy, were built into the very structure of the EMU and its banking system. Policymakers have...

One of the main contributions of Modern Money Theory (MMT) has been to explain why monetarily sovereign governments have a very flexible policy space that is unencumbered by hard financial constraints. Through a detailed analysis of the institutions and practices surrounding the fiscal and...

Scott Fullwiler and Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray review the roles of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury in the context of quantitative easing, and find that the financial crisis has highlighted the limited oversight of Congress and the limited transparency of the Fed. And since a Fed promise...

This paper poses that the one commonality between institutionalist thought and Keynesianism (as presented in his General Theory) was money. Tracing the origins and uses of money, the myth of the development of money as a medium of exchange is dispelled and replaced with money used as evidence of...

In recent years the U.S. has seemed to achieve the best of all possible worlds: robust economic growth, very low unemployment, and low inflation. Many attribute this performance to fewer supply side constraints, as the U.S. has moved away from stifling regulations and other impediments to trade....

The so-called credit crunch of 1966 has long been recognized as the first significant postwar financial crisis and one that required the first important intervention by the Federal Reserve Bank. In the midst of the robust postwar expansion, the Fed began to fear inflation and tightened monetary...

All modern economies have a "chartalist" or "state" money, as acknowledged by Friedrich Knapp and J. M. Keynes. In this paper, I examine the "history" of money to shed light on its origins. I also examine in detail the views of those who accepted the chartalist, or state, approach to money, from...