From the
Monetarist view that I am taking, of course, nothing could be more conventional than "quantitative easing" It is just another way to say "increasing the money supply" The Fed does this by buying something other than short-term government securities--long-term governments bonds, for example--but almost any asset would do.
These models reflect the theoretical difference that exists between Keynesian and
monetarist views of the transmission mechanism and the international adjustment process.
In the strict
monetarist view inflation would only be a monetary phenomenon if the coefficient of the error correction term ([upsilon]) is statistically significant (Durevall and Ndung'u, 2001; Enders, 1995).
The
monetarist view can be summarized by a belief that lags in the implementation of monetary policy create a situation in which it is generally impossible to properly time monetary stimulus and contraction.
Thus, whereas the
monetarist view focuses on bank panics and monetary aggregates to explain crises, the asymmetric information theory looks at more particular microeconomic failures in institutions or markets.
But if the pronouncements of critics of the
monetarist view are heeded, the result will most likely be erratic fluctuations in the money stock caused by attempts to 'fine tune' the economy.
Some authors (see the list of references in both Appendix 1 and Appendix 2) have used a statistically significant positive relation between income, Y, and international reserves holdings of the central bank, R, as evidence favoring a
monetarist view over the Keynesian approach.
Where the Keynesian school saw causation running from prices to money, the
monetarist view was the opposite; the central bank, through its control of the monetary base, could achieve price stability without a long-run inflation-unemployment tradeoff.
This section briefly reviews the evolution of two prominent views on the neutrality of money: the Keynesian view and the
monetarist view.
That is, if money is exogenous as per the
Monetarist view then, to the extent that changes in the quantity of money are associated with changes in the price level, money is, by definition, playing a causal role.
The empirical results consistently support the
monetarist view that changes in real money balances contribute to an acceleration of inflation.