The controversy about money

This article deals with some of the key issues in the long historical controversy about the importance of money in the economy. The Keynesian approach dominated economic thinking until the mid-1960s but with the intensification of inflationary pressures, a monetarist revival took place, particularly in the U.S.A., and there was a growing tendency to re-emphasize the importance of money in economic management and to stress its key role in any anti-inflation strategy. The author examines in detail the empirical evidence and concludes that at this stage the evidence does not support the extreme positions adopted by either side. In the current public discussion about inflation he takes the view that a prices and incomes policy can have an important favourable effect in creating favourable expectations and in offering a reasonably equitable method of reconciling conflicting demands upon the economic system. However, in the long run the containment of inflation requires monetary stability. While the money supply must be allowed to expand steadily in order to provide the financial resources required for economic growth, monetary expansion which is consistently higher than the underlying growth in output is bound to intensify inflationary pressures.