Money, credit and the institutions that manage them.
10 topics · 15 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Inflation Target Ten Years On
Mervyn King · 2002
A decade after adoption, the United Kingdom's inflation target had earned credibility not by removing judgement from monetary policy but by giving…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Lombard Street
Walter Bagehot · 1873
In a panic, lend freely at a penalty rate against good collateral — the rule central banks still reach for a century and a half later.
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Interest and Prices: A Study of the Causes Regulating the Value of Money
Knut Wicksell · 1898
Argues prices rise or fall depending on whether the bank rate is held below or above a hypothetical natural rate of interest, an idea that later…
+5 more at this level
12 of 15 works
Mervyn King
A decade after adoption, the United Kingdom's inflation target had earned credibility not by removing judgement from monetary policy but by giving the public a clear, checkable standard against which to hold the Bank of England to account.
14 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Explains, for a general reader, what the Federal Reserve actually does day to day — setting the policy rate, supervising banks, and acting as lender of last resort — rather than what it is popularly believed to do.
76 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Bank for International Settlements
Sets out the case for central banks issuing their own digital currency rather than ceding the payments system to private and crypto alternatives, and the design choices that decide whether a CBDC preserves or undermines the two-tier banking system.
27 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Walter Bagehot
In a panic, lend freely at a penalty rate against good collateral — the rule central banks still reach for a century and a half later.
about 5.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Irving Fisher
States the equation of exchange linking the money supply and its velocity of circulation to the price level and volume of transactions, and argues that in the long run changes in the quantity of money show up as changes in prices, not output.
515 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Maurice Obstfeld & Kenneth Rogoff
Argues that intermediate exchange rate regimes are inherently unstable once capital moves freely across borders, so countries are pushed toward the corners of the spectrum — a hard peg or a genuine float — with little viable middle ground.
22 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Ben S. Bernanke & Frederic S. Mishkin
A public numerical inflation target disciplines monetary policy and anchors expectations better than either fixed exchange rates or opaque discretion, without requiring a mechanical rule that ignores everything else the central bank observes.
20 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Olivier Blanchard, Giovanni Dell'Ariccia & Paolo Mauro
The low inflation targets and light financial regulation that defined pre-crisis consensus policy left central banks too little room to cut rates before hitting the zero lower bound, arguing for higher targets and a larger role for macroprudential tools.
18 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Bank of England
Works through the practical design questions a central bank has to settle before issuing a digital currency — who can hold it, whether it pays interest, and how it would coexist with commercial bank deposits without destabilising them.
57 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026Knut Wicksell
Argues prices rise or fall depending on whether the bank rate is held below or above a hypothetical natural rate of interest, an idea that later became central to how economists think about what money actually is.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Finn E. Kydland & Edward C. Prescott
A central bank that can revisit its policy each period will be tempted to renege on past promises, so even a well-intentioned discretionary policy delivers worse outcomes than a credible rule would.
19 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026John B. Taylor
Proposes a simple formula tying the central bank's policy interest rate to how far inflation and output sit from target, and shows it tracks the Federal Reserve's actual rate-setting in the years just before the paper was written closely enough to become the benchmark against which policy is judged since.
20 pageslink checked 17 Sept 2026