Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes regional, national, and global economies. Macroeconomists study topics such as output/GDP and national income, unemployment, price indices and inflation, consumption, saving, investment, energy, international trade, and international finance.
In economics, inflation is a general increase of the prices of goods and services in an economy. This is usually measured using the consumer price index (CPI). When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services; consequently, inflation corresponds to a reduction in the purchasing power of money. The opposite of CPI inflation is deflation, a decrease in the general price level of goods and services. The common measure of inflation is the inflation rate, the annualized percentage change in a general price index. As prices faced by households do not all increase at the same rate, the consumer price index (CPI) is often used for this purpose.
Monetarism is a school of thought in monetary economics that emphasizes the role of policy-makers in controlling the amount of money in circulation. It gained prominence in the 1970s, but was mostly abandoned as a practical guidance to monetary policy during the following decade because the strategy was found to not work very well in practice.
The Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act is an act of legislation by the United States government.
The causes of the Great Depression in the early 20th century in the United States have been extensively discussed by economists and remain a matter of active debate. They are part of the larger debate about economic crises and recessions. The specific economic events that took place during the Great Depression are well established.
The quantity theory of money is a theory from monetary economics which states that the general price level of goods and services is directly proportional to the amount of money in circulation, and that the causality runs from money to prices. This implies that the theory potentially explains inflation. It originated in the 16th century and has been proclaimed the oldest surviving theory in economics.
Lawrence Henry White is an American economics professor at George Mason University who teaches graduate level monetary theory and policy. He is considered an authority on the history and theory of free banking. His writings support the abolition of the Federal Reserve System and the promotion of private and competitive banking.
George Selgin is an American economist. He is Senior Fellow and Director Emeritus of the Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, where he is editor-in-chief of the center's blog, Alt-M, Professor Emeritus of economics at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, and an associate editor of Econ Journal Watch. Selgin formerly taught at George Mason University, the University of Hong Kong, and West Virginia University.
Modern monetary theory or modern money theory (MMT) is a heterodox macroeconomic theory that describes currency as a public monopoly and unemployment as evidence that a currency monopolist is overly restricting the supply of the financial assets needed to pay taxes and satisfy savings desires. According to MMT, governments do not need to worry about accumulating debt since they can create new money by using fiscal policy in order to pay interest. MMT argues that the primary risk once the economy reaches full employment is inflation, which acts as the only constraint on spending. MMT also argues that inflation can be addressed by increasing taxes on everyone to reduce the spending capacity of the private sector.
David Ernest William Laidler is an English/Canadian economist who has been one of the foremost scholars of monetarism. He published major economics journal articles on the topic in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His book, The Demand for Money, was published in four editions from 1969 through 1993, initially setting forth the stability of the relationship between income and the demand for money and later taking into consideration the effects of legal, technological, and institutional changes on the demand for money. The book has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese.
The Shadow Open Market Committee (SOMC) is an independent group of economists, first organized in 1973 by Professors Karl Brunner, from the University of Rochester, and Allan Meltzer, from Carnegie Mellon University, to provide a monetarist alternative to the views on monetary policy and its inflation effects then prevailing at the Federal Reserve and within the economics profession.
In economics, stimulus refers to attempts to use monetary policy or fiscal policy to stimulate the economy. Stimulus can also refer to monetary policies such as lowering interest rates and quantitative easing.
Macroeconomic theory has its origins in the study of business cycles and monetary theory. In general, early theorists believed monetary factors could not affect real factors such as real output. John Maynard Keynes attacked some of these "classical" theories and produced a general theory that described the whole economy in terms of aggregates rather than individual, microeconomic parts. Attempting to explain unemployment and recessions, he noticed the tendency for people and businesses to hoard cash and avoid investment during a recession. He argued that this invalidated the assumptions of classical economists who thought that markets always clear, leaving no surplus of goods and no willing labor left idle.
The new neoclassical synthesis (NNS), which is now generally referred to as New Keynesian economics, and occasionally as the New Consensus, is the fusion of the major, modern macroeconomic schools of thought – new classical macroeconomics/real business cycle theory and early New Keynesian economics – into a consensus view on the best way to explain short-run fluctuations in the economy. This new synthesis is analogous to the neoclassical synthesis that combined neoclassical economics with Keynesian macroeconomics. The new synthesis provides the theoretical foundation for much of contemporary mainstream macroeconomics. It is an important part of the theoretical foundation for the work done by the Federal Reserve and many other central banks.
Richard Henry Timberlake Jr. was an American economist who was Professor of Economics at the University of Georgia for much of his career. He became a leading advocate of free banking, the belief that money should be issued by private companies, not by a government monopoly. He wrote about the Legal Tender Cases of the U.S. Supreme Court in his book Constitutional Money: A Review of the Supreme Court's Monetary Decisions.
Scott B. Sumner is an American economist. He was previously the Director of the Program on Monetary Policy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, and a professor at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. His economics blog, The Money Illusion, popularized the idea of nominal GDP targeting, which says that the Federal Reserve and other central banks should target nominal GDP, real GDP growth plus the rate of inflation, to better "induce the correct level of business investment".
Market monetarism is a school of macroeconomic thought that advocates that central banks target the level of nominal income instead of inflation, unemployment, or other measures of economic activity, including in times of shocks such as the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2006, and in the financial crisis that followed. In contrast to traditional monetarists, market monetarists do not believe monetary aggregates or commodity prices such as gold are the optimal guide to intervention. Market monetarists also reject the New Keynesian focus on interest rates as the primary instrument of monetary policy. Market monetarists prefer a nominal income target due to their twin beliefs that rational expectations are crucial to policy, and that markets react instantly to changes in their expectations about future policy, without the "long and variable lags" postulated by Milton Friedman.
David I. Meiselman was an American economist. Among his contributions to the field of economics are his work on the term structure of interest rates, the foundation today of the implementation of monetary policy by major central banks, and his work with Milton Friedman on the impact of monetary policy on the performance of the economy and inflation.
Marvin Seth Goodfriend was an American economist. He held the Allan H. Meltzer Professorship in economics at Carnegie Mellon University; he was previously the director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. Following his 2017 nomination to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the White House decided to forgo renominating Goodfriend at the beginning of the new term.
The real bills doctrine says that as long as bankers lend to businessmen only against the security (collateral) of short-term 30-, 60-, or 90-day commercial paper representing claims to real goods in the process of production, the loans will be just sufficient to finance the production of goods. The doctrine seeks to have real output determine its own means of purchase without affecting prices. Under the real bills doctrine, there is only one policy role for the central bank: lending commercial banks the necessary reserves against real customer bills, which the banks offer as collateral. The term "real bills doctrine" was coined by Lloyd Mints in his 1945 book, A History of Banking Theory. The doctrine was previously known as "the commercial loan theory of banking".
