New Book: The Encyclopedia of Central Banking

New book on central banking, edited by L-P Rochon & Sergio Rossi, has recently been published. I have two chapters: 1. on Classical Dichotomy, & 2. on Dollar Hegemony.

See here.

PS: Posted here with an entry on Bretton Woods by Omar Hamouda.

Classic Paper by Arestis & Eichner: "The Post-Keynesian and Institutionalist Theory of Money and Credit"

Recently, (see here) Matias posted a link to Fred Lee's collection of a classic set of by papers by the late Alfred S. Eichner. He mentioned that this not a complete set of Eichner's remarkable work, and that there are plenty of other exceptional pieces; in particular is Eichner's paper with Philip Arestis: "The Post-Keynesian and Institutionalist Theory of Money and Credit." This work has influenced my research tremendously (especially concerning the authors adherence to the tradition of Veblenian Institutionalism, and their emphasis of an 'open-systems' approach to political economy).

From the Introduction (which is worth quoting at length):

The purpose of this article is two-fold: first, to identify the main elements of what constitutes post-Keynesian and institutionalist monetary theory and, second, to put forward a model general enough to encapsulate most, if not all, of the constituent elements of the post-Keynesian and institutionalist theory of money and credit. One further novel aspect of this article is that we account for the possibility of the openness of economic systems. This is an aspect that has been ignored by the literature on both post-Keynesian and institutionalist economics. 

The emphasis in post-Keynesian and institutionalist monetary theory is on the proposition that "Monetary economics cannot help being institutional economics" [Minsky 1982, p. 280] and that "Capitalism is a monetary economy" [Dilland 1987, p. 1641]. In this view money capital is an institution that is inseparable from the other institutions that comprise economic systems. Money is not merely a medium of exchange. It is tightly linked to the behavior of the enterprise sector and the economy as a whole. Therefore, the basic theme in this approach is inevitably, "The Monetary Theory of Production" [Keynes 1973; Veblen 1964]. It is in fact this Veblenian/Keynesian premise that constitutes the core of what we have labelled in this study "the post- Keynesian and institutionalist theory of money and credit." 

In this monetary theory of production, it is not surprising to find that credit rather than money is the mechanism that enables spending units to bridge any gap between their desired level of spending and the current rate of cash inflow. Money is viewed as essentially endogenous in a credit-based economy, responding to changes in the behavior of economic entities, rather than being subject to the control of the monetary
authorities. Money, in this view, is an output of the system, with the endogenous response by the financial sector governed by the borrowing needs of firms, households, and the government. Once it is recognized that money is credit-driven and therefore endogenously determined, any money creation emanating from fiscal or debt management operations initiated by the authorities or from a favorable balance of payments, can be neutralized through an equivalent reduction in commercial bank credit brought about by the actions of private economic agents.' It clearly follows that government may not be able to create money directly (see, however, Chick [1986]). 

What it can do, instead, is redistribute money among different groups of economic agents. This can happen when governments, in their attempt to increase/reduce the stock of money, set in motion the process whereby bank credit is created/destroyed by groups of economic agents. To the extent that the latter groups are different from those initially receiving/destroying money following the government's initiatives, redistribution of money between those groups takes place. 

The endogenous nature of money and credit is further elaborated upon in the next section with the constituent elements of the model under discussion being brought together in the section that follows. It is precisely here that the openness of economic systems is emphasized and its implications for the post-Keynesian and institutionalist theory of money and credit are compared with the neoclassical view. A final section summarizes the argument.

Read rest here (subscription required).

NBER: Mutual Assistance between Federal Reserve Banks, 1913-1960

By Barry Eichengreen, Arnaud J. Mehl, Livia Chițu, & Gary Richardson

This paper reconstructs the forgotten history of mutual assistance among Reserve Banks in the early years of the Federal Reserve System. We use data on accommodation operations by the 12 Reserve Banks between 1913 and 1960 which enabled them to mutualise their gold reserves in emergency situations. Gold reserve sharing was especially important in response to liquidity crises and bank runs. Cooperation among reserve banks was essential for the cohesion and stability of the US monetary union. But fortunes could change quickly, with emergency recipients of gold turning into providers. Because regional imbalances did not grow endlessly, instead narrowing when region-specific liquidity shocks subsided, mutual assistance created only limited tensions. These findings speak to the current debate over TARGET2 balances in Europe.

Read rest here (subscription required).

Chick & Tily on whatever happened to Keynes’s monetary theory?

New Cambridge Journal of Eeconomics paper by Victoria Chick and Geoff Tily.

From the abstract:

Some see a return to Keynes’s ideas in response to the crisis that began in 2007, but we argue that the resurrected ideas belong to that betrayal of Keynes’s thought known as ‘Keynesian’ economics. What happened is almost a reversal of the Whig history view of economics, in which past knowledge is embodied in later theory: Keynes has been made a pre-Keynesian. We trace this transformation mainly through his monetary theory, though we range more widely where necessary. We state what we consider to be his monetary theory, then identify and summarize the key contributions to its destruction. Then, in a speculative section, we suggest a variety of motivations for this subversion of his ideas. We end by assessing what has been lost, in particular his monetary policy, and suggest social and political pressures that may have been partly responsible.

Read the rest here (subscription required).

Mosler on Krugman, The Unconcious Liberal

 By Warren Mosler,

Yes, unemployment- source of the greatest economic loss as well as a social tragedy and a crime against humanity, is always the evidence deficit spending is too low. There is no exception as a simple point of logic. The currency is a simple public monopoly, and the excess capacity we call unemployment- people looking to sell their labor in exchange for units of that currency- is necessarily a consequence of the monopolist restricting the supply of net financial assets. 

Read rest here.

Art Laffer: "I Was Wrong About Inflation." No Kidding!

Arthur Laffer said that: "Usually when you find the model this far off, you've probably got something wrong with the model, not that the world has changed... inflation does not appear to be monetary base driven." For the whole story go here.

PS: For an heterodox analysis of money and inflation, see here.

When did the term macroeconomics become dominant?

I discussed before the origin of the term macroeconomics (here). The term was introduced most likely by Ragnar Frisch, and become associated with the Keynesian Revolution. Before the rise of the macro/micro divide economics was divided between monetary theory (which roughly corresponded to the macro part) and theory of value and distribution (the micro one). Using my new toy in Google Books we can see when the new terms became dominant.

Note the term macroeconomics takes a very long time to become part of the vocabulary of economists. If Ngram Viewer is to be trusted, only in the 1970s the term macroeconomics became more relevant than monetary theory (which now would be more a sub-field of macro).