<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[longandvariable]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://longandvariable.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[Tony Yates]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://longandvariable.wordpress.com/author/anthonyyates01/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[Everyone has their own &#8216;monetarism&#8217;]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p>This follows reading <a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/why-monetarism-failed/">Paul Krugman&#8217;s recent post</a>.  I wasn&#8217;t there.  Too young, and never in America.  But, nevertheless, I&#8217;ll sketch my own version of what &#8216;monetarism&#8217; means to me.</p>
<ol>
<li> The belief that monetary policy mistakes were behind the business cycle &#8211; illustrated by Friedman and Schwartz&#8217; chartism concluding that the Great Depression was caused by too-tight monetary policy.  They were probably right about this, and this is one bit of &#8216;monetarism&#8217; that has proved enduring and useful.</li>
<li>A focus on the bookkeeping identity of monetary policy PT=MV.  This was helpful during the years when policymakers thought that inflation was a &#8216;cost&#8217; phenomenon to be tackled with prices and incomes policy.  This idea also endures.</li>
<li> The unfortunate idea that it follows from PT=MV that central banks could use money targets to deliver desired changes in P.  These targets were ditched as it was realised, through difficult experience, that money demand [&#8216;v&#8217;] was too unstable for growth rates in M to lead to desirable changes in P.</li>
<li> Arguably, &#8216;monetarism&#8217; includes, or begat a related failure to apprehend that at the zero bound money can increase without bound without affecting P.</li>
<li>Alongside 3 is the view of Friedman that activist monetary policy to stabilise the business cycle was not likely to succeed because policy was hampered by long and variable lags.  Not only <em>could </em>money growth rates deliver growth rates in prices, but this is all policy <em>should </em>aspire to do.  This scepticism about the omniscience of policy was probably overdone, but it was a useful idea, valuable at the time when policymakers thought that armed with huge macroeconometric models they were omniscient.</li>
</ol>
<p>That&#8217;s it.</p>
<p>As I read it, the wars over microfoundations had not much to do with &#8216;monetarism&#8217;.  Except that those &#8211; especially in central banks &#8211; who insisted on bolting on sticky prices and wages to microfounded models cherished this old idea that Friedman and Schwartz shared.</p>
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