The celebrated monetarist arithmetic argument of Sargent and Wallace implies outcomes that may be large and unpleasant. But a dynamic stochastic model calibrated to the U.S. economy reveals the quantitative effect of monetarist arithmetic to be small. Monetary policies that react to the level of...

Recently an intense debate has focused on M2's usefulness as an intermediate target for monetary policy. A review of two leading contributions to the debate indicates that their empirical results are sensitive to changes in key assumptions. Moreover, their empirical results lack the deep...