Economists consider the legacy of Karl Brunner’s monetarism and its influence on current debates over monetary policy. Monetarism emerged in the 1950s and 1960s as a school of economic thought that questioned certain tenets of Keynesianism. Emphasizing the monetary nature of inflation and the responsibility of central banks for price stability, monetarism held sway in the inflation-plagued 1970s, but saw its influence begin to decline in the 1980s. Although Milton Friedman is the economist most closely associated with the development of monetarism, it was Karl Brunner (1916–1989) who introduced the term into the current vocabulary of economics and shaped its meaning. In this volume, leading economists—many of them Brunner’s friends and former colleagues—consider the influence of Brunner’s monetarism on current debates over monetary policy. Some contributors were participants in debates between Keynesians and monetarists; others analyze specific aspects of monetarism as theorized by Brunner and his close collaborator Allan Meltzer, or address its influence on US and European monetary policy. Others take the opportunity to examine Brunner-Meltzer monetarism through the lens of contemporary macroeconomics and monetary models. The book grows out of a symposium that marked the 100th anniversary of Brunner’s birth. Contributors Ernst Baltensperger, Michael D. Bordo, Pierrick Clerc, Alex Cukierman, Michel De Vroey, James Forder, Benjamin M. Friedman, Kevin D. Hoover, Thomas J. Jordan, David Laidler, Allan H. Meltzer, Thomas Moser, Edward Nelson, Juan Pablo Nicolini, Charles I. Plosser, Kenneth Rogoff, Marcel Savioz, Jürgen von Hagen, Stephen Williamson

The first book-length work on market monetarism, written by its leading scholar. Is it possible that the consensus around what caused the 2008 Great Recession is almost entirely wrong? It’s happened before. Just as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz led the economics community in the 1960s to reevaluate its view of what caused the Great Depression, the same may be happening now to our understanding of the first economic crisis of the 21st century. Foregoing the usual relitigating of problems such as housing markets and banking crises, renowned monetary economist Scott Sumner argues that the Great Recession came down to one thing: nominal GDP, the sum of all nominal spending in the economy, which the Federal Reserve erred in allowing to plummet. The Money Illusion is an end-to-end case for this school of thought, known as market monetarism, written by its leading voice in economics. Based almost entirely on standard macroeconomic concepts, this highly accessible text lays the groundwork for a simple yet fundamentally radical understanding of how monetary policy can work best: providing a stable environment for a market economy to flourish.

Here is a clear and thoughtful introduction to the current literature of monetary economics and macroeconomics. The book's central theme is a view of the macroeconomy in which recession and inflation are to be interpreted as the result of the economy adjusting to a discrepancy between the quantity of money supplied and the quantity of money demanded, with the latter quantity being determined by a stable aggregate demand function. The author discusses in turn the place of monetarism in macroeconomics, its implications for the interpretation of the short-run demand for money function, its relationship to equilibrium business cycle theory, the disequilibrium transmission mechanism that underlies the monetarist viewpoint, and finally its implications for the policy of âeoegradualism.âe He synthesizes a large body of theoretical and empirical literature, and his empirical observations are broadly based on the experiences of England and Australia as well as Canada and the United States. Each chapter can be read apart from the others, and Laidler has taken particular care to keep the technical level of exposition low without sacrificing much in the way of theoretical sophistication.

'. . . makes a significant contribution.' - Tom Bottomore, University of Sussex, UK

'In the context of the current economic climate, this volume provides an excellent opportunity for reappraising the arguments on both sides of the debate. . . the importance of this volume is that it provides the interested reader with an excellent summary of the monetarist position prior to the current crisis.' - Economic Outlook and Business Review

Now thoroughly revised and updated, this edition also includes a new introduction which places Britain's experience of monetarism into a world context.