The pickup in the U.S. inflation rate to its highest rates in forty years has led to renewed attention being given to the Great Inflation of the 1970s. This paper asks with regard to the Great Inflation: “How did it happen?” The answer offered is the fact that, in both the United Kingdom and...

Friedman and Schwartz (1982) and Goodhart (1982) report a zero correlation between money growth and output growth in U.K. historical data. This finding is puzzling, as there is wide agreement that changes in monetary policy are frequently nonneutral in the short run and that the U.K. experience,...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the merits of monetary policy rules that utilize as their principal target variable the level or growth rate of some aggregate measure of nominal spending, such as nominal GDP, rather than a monetary aggregate or an index of inflation. The main objective...

This paper updates and extends Friedman's (1972) evidence on the lag between monetary policy actions and the response of inflation. Our evidence is based on UK and US data for the period 1953 2001 on money growth rates, inflation, and interest rates, as well as annual data on money growth and...

We argue that Schularick and Taylor's (2012) comparison of credit growth and monetary growth as financial-crisis predictors does not necessarily provide a valid basis for achieving one of their stated intentions: evaluating the relative merits of the "money view" and "credit view" as accounts of...