This is a review of Allan Meltzer's "A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 2." By carefully reviewing thousands of transcripts and records, Meltzer's history lets policy makers explain their decisions in their own words, and creatively weaves historical events into a single exceptionally...

Much of the recent economic debate about the impact of stimulus packages has focused on the size of the crucial government purchases multiplier. But equally crucial is the size of the government purchases multiplicand--the change in government purchases of goods and services that the multiplier...

<DIV>This timely volume presents the latest thinking on the monetary policy rules and seeks to determine just what types of rules and policy guidelines function best. A unique cooperative research effort that allowed contributors to evaluate different policy rules using their own specific approaches,...</div>

This paper assesses the emerging market experience with inflation targeting in recent years. It places this experience in the broader context of global monetary policy. It shows that a shift away from rules based policy by many developed country central banks has adversely affected the inflation...

Research in the early 1980s found that the gains from international coordination of monetary policy were quantitatively small compared to simply getting domestic policy right. That prediction turned out to be a pretty good description of monetary policy in the 1980s, 1990s, and until recently....