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Monetarism

January 06, 2023

Monetarism is a school of thought in monetary economics that emphasizes the role of governments in controlling the amount of money in circulation. Monetarist theory asserts that variations in the money supply have major influences on national output in the short run and on price levels over longer periods. Monetarists assert that the objectives of monetary policy are best met by targeting the growth rate of the money supply rather than by engaging in discretionary monetary policy.[1] Monetarism is commonly associated with neoliberalism.[2]

  Inflation
  Deflation
  M2 money supply increases Year/Year

Monetarism today is mainly associated with the work of Milton Friedman, who was among the generation of economists to reject Keynesian economics and criticise Keynes's theory of fighting economic downturns using fiscal policy (government spending). Friedman and Anna Schwartz wrote an influential book, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, and argued "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon".[3]

Though he opposed the existence of the Federal Reserve,[4] Friedman advocated, given its existence, a central bank policy aimed at keeping the growth of the money supply at a rate commensurate with the growth in productivity and demand for goods.

Description

Monetarism is an economic theory that focuses on the macroeconomic effects of the supply of money and central banking. Formulated by Milton Friedman, it argues that excessive expansion of the money supply is inherently inflationary, and that monetary authorities should focus solely on maintaining price stability.

This theory draws its roots from two historically antagonistic schools of thought: the hard money policies that dominated monetary thinking in the late 19th century, and the monetary theories of John Maynard Keynes, who, working in the inter-war period during the failure of the restored gold standard, proposed a demand-driven model for money.[5] While Keynes had focused on the stability of a currency's value, with panics based on an insufficient money supply leading to the use of an alternate currency and collapse of the monetary system, Friedman focused on price stability.

The result was summarised in a historical analysis of monetary policy, Monetary History of the United States 1867–1960, which Friedman coauthored with Anna Schwartz. The book attributed inflation to excess money supply generated by a central bank. It attributed deflationary spirals to the reverse effect of a failure of a central bank to support the money supply during a liquidity crunch.[6]

Friedman originally proposed a fixed monetary rule, called Friedman's k-percent rule, where the money supply would be automatically increased by a fixed percentage per year. Under this rule, there would be no leeway for the central reserve bank, as money supply increases could be determined "by a computer", and business could anticipate all money supply changes.[7][unreliable source?][8] With other monetarists he believed that the active manipulation of the money supply or its growth rate is more likely to destabilise than stabilise the economy.

Opposition to the gold standard

Most monetarists oppose the gold standard. Friedman viewed a pure gold standard as impractical. For example, whereas one of the benefits of the gold standard is that the intrinsic limitations to the growth of the money supply by the use of gold would prevent inflation, if the growth of population or increase in trade outpaces the money supply, there would be no way to counteract deflation and reduced liquidity (and any attendant recession) except for the mining of more gold. But he also admitted that if a government was willing to surrender control over its monetary policy and not to interfere with economic activities, a gold-based economy would be possible.[9]

Rise

Clark Warburton is credited with making the first solid empirical case for the monetarist interpretation of business fluctuations in a series of papers from 1945.[1]p. 493 Within mainstream economics, the rise of monetarism accelerated from Milton Friedman's 1956 restatement of the quantity theory of money. Friedman argued that the demand for money could be described as depending on a small number of economic variables.[10]

Thus, where the money supply expanded, people would not simply wish to hold the extra money in idle money balances; i.e., if they were in equilibrium before the increase, they were already holding money balances to suit their requirements, and thus after the increase they would have money balances surplus to their requirements. These excess money balances would therefore be spent and hence aggregate demand would rise. Similarly, if the money supply were reduced people would want to replenish their holdings of money by reducing their spending. In this, Friedman challenged a simplification attributed to Keynes suggesting that "money does not matter."[10] Thus the word 'monetarist' was coined.

The rise of the popularity of monetarism also picked up in political circles when Keynesian economics seemed unable to explain or cure the seemingly contradictory problems of rising unemployment and inflation in response to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1972 and the oil shocks of 1973. On the one hand, higher unemployment seemed to call for Keynesian reflation, but on the other hand rising inflation seemed to call for Keynesian disinflation. The social-democratic post-war consensus that had prevailed in first world countries was thus called into question by the rising neoliberal political forces.[2]

In 1979, United States President Jimmy Carter appointed as Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker, who made fighting inflation his primary objective, and who restricted the money supply (in accordance with the Friedman rule) to tame inflation in the economy. The result was a major rise in interest rates, not only in the United States; but worldwide. The "Volcker shock" continued from 1979 to the summer of 1982, decreasing inflation and increasing unemployment.[11]

By the time Margaret Thatcher, Leader of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, won the 1979 general election defeating the sitting Labour Government led by James Callaghan, the UK had endured several years of severe inflation, which was rarely below the 10% mark and by the time of the May 1979 general election, stood at 15.4%.[citation needed] Thatcher implemented monetarism as the weapon in her battle against inflation, and succeeded at reducing it to 4.6% by 1983. However, unemployment in the United Kingdom increased from 5.7% in 1979 to 12.2% in 1983, reaching 13.0% in 1982; starting with the first quarter of 1980, the UK economy contracted in terms of real gross domestic product for six straight quarters.[12]

 
Money supply decreased significantly between Black Tuesday and the Bank Holiday in March 1933 in the wake of massive bank runs across the United States.

Monetarists not only sought to explain present problems; they also interpreted historical ones. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their book A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 argued that the Great Depression of the 1930s was caused by a massive contraction of the money supply (they deemed it "the Great Contraction"[13]), and not by the lack of investment Keynes had argued. They also maintained that post-war inflation was caused by an over-expansion of the money supply.

They made famous the assertion of monetarism that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." Many Keynesian economists initially believed that the Keynesian vs. monetarist debate was solely about whether fiscal or monetary policy was the more effective tool of demand management. By the mid-1970s, however, the debate had moved on to other issues as monetarists began presenting a fundamental challenge to Keynesianism.

Monetarists argued that central banks sometimes caused major unexpected fluctuations in the money supply. They asserted that actively increasing demand through the central bank can have negative unintended consequences.

Current state

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan argued that the 1990s decoupling was explained by a virtuous cycle of productivity and investment on one hand, and a certain degree of "irrational exuberance" in the investment sector on the other.

There are also arguments that monetarism is a special case of Keynesian theory. The central test case over the validity of these theories would be the possibility of a liquidity trap, like that experienced by Japan. Ben Bernanke, Princeton professor and another former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, argued that monetary policy could respond to zero interest rate conditions by direct expansion of the money supply. In his words, "We have the keys to the printing press, and we are not afraid to use them."

These disagreements—along with the role of monetary policies in trade liberalisation, international investment, and central bank policy—remain lively topics of investigation and argument.

Notable proponents

See also

General:

References

  1. ^ a b Phillip Cagan, 1987. "Monetarism", The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, v. 3, Reprinted in John Eatwell et al. (1989), Money: The New Palgrave, pp. 195–205, 492–97.
  2. ^ a b Harvey, David (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-928326-2.
  3. ^ Friedman, Milton (2008). Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691003542. OCLC 994352014.
  4. ^ Doherty, Brian (June 1995). "Best of Both Worlds". Reason. Retrieved July 28, 2010.
  5. ^ Mankiw, N. Gregory. "Real Business Cycles: A New Keynesian Perspective". Journal of Economic Perspectives 3.3 (1989): 79–90. Web.|date=October 2013
  6. ^ Bordo, Michael D. (1989). "The Contribution of A Monetury History". Money, History, & International Finance: Essays in Honor of Anna J. Schwartz. The Increase in Reserve Requirements, 1936-37. University of Chicago Press. p. 46. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.736.9649. ISBN 0-226-06593-6. Retrieved 2019-07-25.
  7. ^ Thomas Palley (November 27, 2006). "Milton Friedman: The Great Conservative Partisan". Retrieved June 20, 2013.
  8. ^ Ip, Greg; Whitehouse, Mark (2006-11-17). "How Milton Friedman Changed Economics, Policy and Markets". The Wall Street Journal.
  9. ^ . Archived from the original on November 14, 2012.
  10. ^ a b Friedman, Milton (1970). "A Theoretical Framework for Monetary Analysis". Journal of Political Economy. 78 (2): 193–238 [p. 210]. doi:10.1086/259623. JSTOR 1830684. S2CID 154459930.
  11. ^ Reichart Alexandre & Abdelkader Slifi (2016). 'The Influence of Monetarism on Federal Reserve Policy during the 1980s.' Cahiers d'économie Politique/Papers in Political Economy, (1), pp. 107–50. https://www.cairn.info/revue-cahiers-d-economie-politique-2016-1-page-107.htm
  12. ^ "Real Gross Domestic Product for United Kingdom, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis". January 1975. Retrieved December 16, 2018.
  13. ^ Milton Friedman; Anna Schwartz (2008). The Great Contraction, 1929–1933 (New ed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-13794-0.

Further references

  • Andersen, Leonall C., and Jerry L. Jordan, 1968. "Monetary and Fiscal Actions: A Test of Their Relative Importance in Economic Stabilisation", Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review (November), pp. 11–24. PDF (30 sec. load: press +) and HTML.
  • _____, 1969. "Monetary and Fiscal Actions: A Test of Their Relative Importance in Economic Stabilisation — Reply", Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review (April), pp. 12–16. PDF (15 sec. load; press +) and HTML.
  • Brunner, Karl, and Allan H. Meltzer, 1993. Money and the Economy: Issues in Monetary Analysis, Cambridge. Description and chapter previews, pp. ix–x.
  • Cagan, Phillip, 1965. Determinants and Effects of Changes in the Stock of Money, 1875–1960. NBER. Foreword by Milton Friedman, pp. xiii–xxviii. Table of Contents.
  • Friedman, Milton, ed. 1956. Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money, Chicago. Chapter 1 is previewed at Friedman, 2005, ch. 2 link.
  • _____, 1960. A Program for Monetary Stability. Fordham University Press.
  • _____, 1968. "The Role of Monetary Policy", American Economic Review, 58(1), pp. (press +).
  • _____, [1969] 2005. The Optimum Quantity of Money. Description and table of contents, with previews of 3 chapters.
  • Friedman, Milton, and David Meiselman, 1963. "The Relative Stability of Monetary Velocity and the Investment Multiplier in the United States, 1897–1958", in Stabilization Policies, pp. 165–268. Prentice-Hall/Commission on Money and Credit, 1963.
  • Friedman, Milton, and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, 1963a. "Money and Business Cycles", Review of Economics and Statistics, 45(1), Part 2, Supplement, p. p. 32–64. Reprinted in Schwartz, 1987, Money in Historical Perspective, ch. 2.
  • _____. 1963b. A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. Princeton. Page-searchable links to chapters on 1929-41 and 1948–60
  • Johnson, Harry G., 1971. "The Keynesian Revolutions and the Monetarist Counter-Revolution", American Economic Review, 61(2), p. p. 1–14. Reprinted in John Cunningham Wood and Ronald N. Woods, ed., 1990, Milton Friedman: Critical Assessments, v. 2, p. p. 72 – 88. Routledge,
  • Laidler, David E.W., 1993. The Demand for Money: Theories, Evidence, and Problems, 4th ed. Description.
  • Schwartz, Anna J., 1987. Money in Historical Perspective, University of Chicago Press. Description and Chapter-preview links, pp. vii-viii.
  • Warburton, Clark, 1966. Depression, Inflation, and Monetary Policy; Selected Papers, 1945–1953 Johns Hopkins Press. Amazon Summary in Anna J. Schwartz, Money in Historical Perspective, 1987.

External links

January 06, 2023
monetarism, school, thought, monetary, economics, that, emphasizes, role, governments, controlling, amount, money, circulation, monetarist, theory, asserts, that, variations, money, supply, have, major, influences, national, output, short, price, levels, over,. Monetarism is a school of thought in monetary economics that emphasizes the role of governments in controlling the amount of money in circulation Monetarist theory asserts that variations in the money supply have major influences on national output in the short run and on price levels over longer periods Monetarists assert that the objectives of monetary policy are best met by targeting the growth rate of the money supply rather than by engaging in discretionary monetary policy 1 Monetarism is commonly associated with neoliberalism 2 Inflation Deflation M2 money supply increases Year Year Monetarism today is mainly associated with the work of Milton Friedman who was among the generation of economists to reject Keynesian economics and criticise Keynes s theory of fighting economic downturns using fiscal policy government spending Friedman and Anna Schwartz wrote an influential book A Monetary History of the United States 1867 1960 and argued inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon 3 Though he opposed the existence of the Federal Reserve 4 Friedman advocated given its existence a central bank policy aimed at keeping the growth of the money supply at a rate commensurate with the growth in productivity and demand for goods Contents 1 Description 1 1 Opposition to the gold standard 2 Rise 3 Current state 4 Notable proponents 5 See also 6 References 7 Further references 8 External linksDescription EditMonetarism is an economic theory that focuses on the macroeconomic effects of the supply of money and central banking Formulated by Milton Friedman it argues that excessive expansion of the money supply is inherently inflationary and that monetary authorities should focus solely on maintaining price stability This theory draws its roots from two historically antagonistic schools of thought the hard money policies that dominated monetary thinking in the late 19th century and the monetary theories of John Maynard Keynes who working in the inter war period during the failure of the restored gold standard proposed a demand driven model for money 5 While Keynes had focused on the stability of a currency s value with panics based on an insufficient money supply leading to the use of an alternate currency and collapse of the monetary system Friedman focused on price stability The result was summarised in a historical analysis of monetary policy Monetary History of the United States 1867 1960 which Friedman coauthored with Anna Schwartz The book attributed inflation to excess money supply generated by a central bank It attributed deflationary spirals to the reverse effect of a failure of a central bank to support the money supply during a liquidity crunch 6 Friedman originally proposed a fixed monetary rule called Friedman s k percent rule where the money supply would be automatically increased by a fixed percentage per year Under this rule there would be no leeway for the central reserve bank as money supply increases could be determined by a computer and business could anticipate all money supply changes 7 unreliable source 8 With other monetarists he believed that the active manipulation of the money supply or its growth rate is more likely to destabilise than stabilise the economy Opposition to the gold standard Edit Most monetarists oppose the gold standard Friedman viewed a pure gold standard as impractical For example whereas one of the benefits of the gold standard is that the intrinsic limitations to the growth of the money supply by the use of gold would prevent inflation if the growth of population or increase in trade outpaces the money supply there would be no way to counteract deflation and reduced liquidity and any attendant recession except for the mining of more gold But he also admitted that if a government was willing to surrender control over its monetary policy and not to interfere with economic activities a gold based economy would be possible 9 Rise EditClark Warburton is credited with making the first solid empirical case for the monetarist interpretation of business fluctuations in a series of papers from 1945 1 p 493 Within mainstream economics the rise of monetarism accelerated from Milton Friedman s 1956 restatement of the quantity theory of money Friedman argued that the demand for money could be described as depending on a small number of economic variables 10 Thus where the money supply expanded people would not simply wish to hold the extra money in idle money balances i e if they were in equilibrium before the increase they were already holding money balances to suit their requirements and thus after the increase they would have money balances surplus to their requirements These excess money balances would therefore be spent and hence aggregate demand would rise Similarly if the money supply were reduced people would want to replenish their holdings of money by reducing their spending In this Friedman challenged a simplification attributed to Keynes suggesting that money does not matter 10 Thus the word monetarist was coined The rise of the popularity of monetarism also picked up in political circles when Keynesian economics seemed unable to explain or cure the seemingly contradictory problems of rising unemployment and inflation in response to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1972 and the oil shocks of 1973 On the one hand higher unemployment seemed to call for Keynesian reflation but on the other hand rising inflation seemed to call for Keynesian disinflation The social democratic post war consensus that had prevailed in first world countries was thus called into question by the rising neoliberal political forces 2 In 1979 United States President Jimmy Carter appointed as Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker who made fighting inflation his primary objective and who restricted the money supply in accordance with the Friedman rule to tame inflation in the economy The result was a major rise in interest rates not only in the United States but worldwide The Volcker shock continued from 1979 to the summer of 1982 decreasing inflation and increasing unemployment 11 By the time Margaret Thatcher Leader of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom won the 1979 general election defeating the sitting Labour Government led by James Callaghan the UK had endured several years of severe inflation which was rarely below the 10 mark and by the time of the May 1979 general election stood at 15 4 citation needed Thatcher implemented monetarism as the weapon in her battle against inflation and succeeded at reducing it to 4 6 by 1983 However unemployment in the United Kingdom increased from 5 7 in 1979 to 12 2 in 1983 reaching 13 0 in 1982 starting with the first quarter of 1980 the UK economy contracted in terms of real gross domestic product for six straight quarters 12 Money supply decreased significantly between Black Tuesday and the Bank Holiday in March 1933 in the wake of massive bank runs across the United States Monetarists not only sought to explain present problems they also interpreted historical ones Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their book A Monetary History of the United States 1867 1960 argued that the Great Depression of the 1930s was caused by a massive contraction of the money supply they deemed it the Great Contraction 13 and not by the lack of investment Keynes had argued They also maintained that post war inflation was caused by an over expansion of the money supply They made famous the assertion of monetarism that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon Many Keynesian economists initially believed that the Keynesian vs monetarist debate was solely about whether fiscal or monetary policy was the more effective tool of demand management By the mid 1970s however the debate had moved on to other issues as monetarists began presenting a fundamental challenge to Keynesianism Monetarists argued that central banks sometimes caused major unexpected fluctuations in the money supply They asserted that actively increasing demand through the central bank can have negative unintended consequences Current state EditFormer Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan argued that the 1990s decoupling was explained by a virtuous cycle of productivity and investment on one hand and a certain degree of irrational exuberance in the investment sector on the other There are also arguments that monetarism is a special case of Keynesian theory The central test case over the validity of these theories would be the possibility of a liquidity trap like that experienced by Japan Ben Bernanke Princeton professor and another former chairman of the U S Federal Reserve argued that monetary policy could respond to zero interest rate conditions by direct expansion of the money supply In his words We have the keys to the printing press and we are not afraid to use them These disagreements along with the role of monetary policies in trade liberalisation international investment and central bank policy remain lively topics of investigation and argument Notable proponents EditKarl Brunner Phillip D Cagan Milton Friedman Alan Greenspan David Laidler Allan Meltzer Anna Schwartz Margaret Thatcher Paul Volcker Clark WarburtonSee also EditAustrian School of economics Chicago school of economics Demurrage currency Fiscalism usually contrasted to monetarism Inflation targeting Market monetarism Modern Monetary Theory General Macroeconomics Political economyReferences Edit a b Phillip Cagan 1987 Monetarism The New Palgrave A Dictionary of Economics v 3 Reprinted in John Eatwell et al 1989 Money The New Palgrave pp 195 205 492 97 a b Harvey David 2005 A Brief History of Neoliberalism Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 928326 2 Friedman Milton 2008 Monetary History of the United States 1867 1960 Princeton University Press ISBN 978 0691003542 OCLC 994352014 Doherty Brian June 1995 Best of Both Worlds Reason Retrieved July 28 2010 Mankiw N Gregory Real Business Cycles A New Keynesian Perspective Journal of Economic Perspectives 3 3 1989 79 90 Web date October 2013 Bordo Michael D 1989 The Contribution of A Monetury History Money History amp International Finance Essays in Honor of Anna J Schwartz The Increase in Reserve Requirements 1936 37 University of Chicago Press p 46 CiteSeerX 10 1 1 736 9649 ISBN 0 226 06593 6 Retrieved 2019 07 25 Thomas Palley November 27 2006 Milton Friedman The Great Conservative Partisan Retrieved June 20 2013 Ip Greg Whitehouse Mark 2006 11 17 How Milton Friedman Changed Economics Policy and Markets The Wall Street Journal Monetary Central Planning and the State Part 27 Milton Friedman s Second Thoughts on the Costs of Paper Money Archived from the original on November 14 2012 a b Friedman Milton 1970 A Theoretical Framework for Monetary Analysis Journal of Political Economy 78 2 193 238 p 210 doi 10 1086 259623 JSTOR 1830684 S2CID 154459930 Reichart Alexandre amp Abdelkader Slifi 2016 The Influence of Monetarism on Federal Reserve Policy during the 1980s Cahiers d economie Politique Papers in Political Economy 1 pp 107 50 https www cairn info revue cahiers d economie politique 2016 1 page 107 htm Real Gross Domestic Product for United Kingdom Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis January 1975 Retrieved December 16 2018 Milton Friedman Anna Schwartz 2008 The Great Contraction 1929 1933 New ed Princeton University Press ISBN 978 0 691 13794 0 Further references EditAndersen Leonall C and Jerry L Jordan 1968 Monetary and Fiscal Actions A Test of Their Relative Importance in Economic Stabilisation Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review November pp 11 24 PDF 30 sec load press and HTML 1969 Monetary and Fiscal Actions A Test of Their Relative Importance in Economic Stabilisation Reply Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis Review April pp 12 16 PDF 15 sec load press and HTML Brunner Karl and Allan H Meltzer 1993 Money and the Economy Issues in Monetary Analysis Cambridge Description and chapter previews pp ix x Cagan Phillip 1965 Determinants and Effects of Changes in the Stock of Money 1875 1960 NBER Foreword by Milton Friedman pp xiii xxviii Table of Contents Friedman Milton ed 1956 Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money Chicago Chapter 1 is previewed at Friedman 2005 ch 2 link 1960 A Program for Monetary Stability Fordham University Press 1968 The Role of Monetary Policy American Economic Review 58 1 pp 1 17 press 1969 2005 The Optimum Quantity of Money Description and table of contents with previews of 3 chapters Friedman Milton and David Meiselman 1963 The Relative Stability of Monetary Velocity and the Investment Multiplier in the United States 1897 1958 in Stabilization Policies pp 165 268 Prentice Hall Commission on Money and Credit 1963 Friedman Milton and Anna Jacobson Schwartz 1963a Money and Business Cycles Review of Economics and Statistics 45 1 Part 2 Supplement p p 32 64 Reprinted in Schwartz 1987 Money in Historical Perspective ch 2 1963b A Monetary History of the United States 1867 1960 Princeton Page searchable links to chapters on 1929 41 and 1948 60 Johnson Harry G 1971 The Keynesian Revolutions and the Monetarist Counter Revolution American Economic Review 61 2 p p 1 14 Reprinted in John Cunningham Wood and Ronald N Woods ed 1990 Milton Friedman Critical Assessments v 2 p p 72 88 Routledge Laidler David E W 1993 The Demand for Money Theories Evidence and Problems 4th ed Description Schwartz Anna J 1987 Money in Historical Perspective University of Chicago Press Description and Chapter preview links pp vii viii Warburton Clark 1966 Depression Inflation and Monetary Policy Selected Papers 1945 1953 Johns Hopkins Press Amazon Summary in Anna J Schwartz Money in Historical Perspective 1987 External links Edit Monetarism at The New School s Economics Department s History of Economic Thought website McCallum Bennett T 2008 Monetarism In David R Henderson ed Concise Encyclopedia of Economics 2nd ed Indianapolis Library of Economics and Liberty ISBN 978 0865976658 OCLC 237794267 Monetarism from the Economics A Z of The Economist Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Monetarism amp oldid 1115306777, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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