- What did Milton Friedman mean when he argued that inflation is 'always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon'?
- How did the 1970s inflation crisis provide practical evidence for Friedman's monetarist theories?
- Why did central banks eventually abandon precise monetary targeting even after adopting Friedman's ideas?
Monetary Policy and Central Banking
How central banks manage money supply and interest rates.
- Why would workers and firms eventually cancel out the effects of a predictable government stimulus?
- Which eleven countries fixed their exchange rates to the euro on 1 January 1999?
- Why was the irrevocability of the exchange rate fix considered essential to the euro's design?
- What gap existed between the euro's launch as an electronic currency and the arrival of physical banknotes and coins?
- What conditions does Robert Mundell's theory of optimum currency areas say a group of countries needs before sharing a currency?
- Why did economists later question whether the eurozone actually met Mundell's criteria?
- How did Mundell's 1960s theoretical work give the euro project intellectual respectability decades later?
- Why can't a government credibly promise not to inflate the economy if it retains full discretion over monetary policy?
- How does Kydland and Prescott's time-inconsistency problem justify central bank independence?
- What did the original Phillips curve claim about the relationship between inflation and unemployment?
- What lesson did central banks eventually take from Phelps's analysis?
- What range of denominations did the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe print during the hyperinflation crisis?
- How quickly were prices rising in Zimbabwe during the worst of the hyperinflation, according to the entry?
- What is the hundred-trillion-dollar note worth today, and why?
- Why did the timing of the award, during the sovereign-debt crisis, strike many as ironic?
- How did Bernanke apply Diamond and Dybvig's theoretical insights during his time as Federal Reserve chairman in 2008?