The economic crisis that began in 2007 and still lingers has invited comparison with the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has also generated renewed interest in Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s explanation of the latter as mainly the consequence of the Fed’s failure as a lender of last...

Specific ideas about the Fisher relation between real and nominal interest rates and more general ideas about the nature of the central bank's duty to support the financial system in times of crisis were important to the Monetarist re-assessment of the causes of the Great Depression and what...

The Fisher relation played a very different role in debates surrounding the Great Depression and the more recent Great Recession. This paper explores some of these differences, and suggests an explanation for them derived from a sketch of the idea’s evolution between the two events, thus...

Milton Friedman's contributions to and influence on macroeconomics are discussed, beginning with his work on the consumption function and the demand for money, not to mention monetary history, which helped to undermine the post World War 2 "Keynesian" consensus in the area. His inter-related...

The first of these essays was written for a happy occasion – my acceptance of honorary membership in the European Society for the History of Economic Thought. The second marked an altogether sadder event - the death of Mark Blaug. Though at first sight their topics are very different, both in...

The monetary economy has properties that cannot be analyzed using the tools of today's dynamic general equilibrium analysis. Keynes's economics, far from being an aberration in the otherwise orderly evolution of modern macroeconomics from Adam Smith's ideas about the "invisible hand", was a...

John Crow's 1988 Hanson Lecture argued for making price stability the goal of Canada's monetary policy, but in the early 1990s, political and economic circumstances led policy makers to settle for a 2 percent inflation target instead. The recently instituted review of the Inflation Control...

Successes and failures in monetary policy stem mainly from coherence or lack thereof in the monetary order, rather than the tactical skills of policy makers. Crucial here are questions of consistency among the economic ideas that the policy regime embodies, the way in which the economy actually...

It is argued that today's Canadian monetary system has certain important characteristics in common with a free banking regime such as might have evolved had matters been left to market forces, and that the Bank of Canada's recent success probably has more than a little to do with this fact. It...

The debate about whether Canada should seek some form of monetary integration with the United States is surveyed. It is argued that the choice here is among overall monetary orders, rather than among exchange rate regimes considered in isolation, with particular attention needing to be paid to...