Helicopter Ben, monetarism, the New Keynesian credit view and loanable funds

Brett Fiebinger and Marc Lavoie

No 20-2018, FMM Working Paper from IMK at the Hans Boeckler Foundation, Macroeconomic Policy Institute

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine the intellectual roots of monetary dominance; specifically, the view that fiscal policy is largely irrelevant to counter-cyclical macro stabilisation and long-run output growth. A first step towards monetary dominance was the monetarist reinterpretation of the Great Depression. In the 1990s orthodoxy replaced money supply targeting with inflation targeting while preserving monetarist results. In this monetarism without money, fiscal policy was not needed in the short-run for macro stabilisation, and in the long-run could only lead to higher inflation rates and to higher real interest rates that lowered potential output by crowding-out private investment. Expansionary fiscal policy was mostly overlooked in the early 2000s New Keynesian literature on the zero lower bound; instead, the optimism on unconventional monetary policies failed to prepare policymakers for the Global Financial Crisis. The crisis demands far-reaching changes to macro theory not least of which is a recognition that the theory of loanable funds is incapable of providing any insight into how the financial system works in practice or the long-term effects of fiscal policy.

Keywords: quantitative easing; monetarism; bank lending channel; loanable funds (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B31 E51 E52 E58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-his, nep-mac and nep-mon
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.boeckler.de/pdf/p_fmm_imk_wp_20_2018.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Helicopter Ben, Monetarism, The New Keynesian Credit View and Loanable Funds (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:imk:fmmpap:20-2018

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in FMM Working Paper from IMK at the Hans Boeckler Foundation, Macroeconomic Policy Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sabine Nemitz (sabine-nemitz@boeckler.de).