The causes of the "great inflation" of the sixteenth century have long been the subject of controversy. Since some major work in the 1930s, historians have argued over a "monetary" and a "real" interpretation. What we show in this paper is, first, that there was a dissenting opinion even then;...

In a world of endogenous money, the central bank's role in monetary policy is reduced to the setting of a very short-term official rate of interest, which indicates the price at which it will make liquidity available to the banking system. However, it is changes in market rates that affect...

This paper engages the last testimony of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, Alan Greenspan, before a joint session of Congress in July 2005. It identifies nine areas we relate to the arguments of John Kenneth Galbraith, summarized in his recent contribution, The Economics of Innocent...

Relevant economic literature frequently focuses on the impact of credit shocks on housing prices. The macroeconomic doctrine of the new consensus macroeconomics completely ignores bank credit. However, the Great Recession has highlighted the importance of bank credit. The purpose of this article...

Relevant economic literature frequently focuses on the impact of credit shocks on housing prices. The macroeconomic doctrine of the new consensus macroeconomics completely ignores bank credit. However, the Great Recession has highlighted the importance of bank credit. The purpose of this article...

Current economic policy upgrades monetary policy and downgrades fiscal policy. Monetary policy involves the manipulation of the central bank interest rate, with the specific objective of achieving the main goal of monetary policy, which is, in most cases, the inflation rate. Fiscal policy should...

This paper attempts to quantify the U.S. housing market slump and its likely impact on consumption. In doing so, it bypasses the traditional approach that suggests that there is no nationwide housing market but a compendium of segmented markets. The paper is not an exercise in forecasting but an...