A primary concern in monetary economics is whether a purely private monetary regime is consistent with macroeconomic stability. I show that a competitive regime is inherently unstable due to the properties of endogenously determined limits on private money creation. Precisely, there is a...

This paper claims that anticipations of a promised massive future government bailout of owners of fallen bank shares suddenly caused a big jump in inflation in Israel in October 1983. That month, the government promised that four or five years later it would compensate innocent people for the...