THEORIES of monetary and financial markets are generally concerned with the behavior of broad aggregates. As yet, economists have not successfully blended the rich variety of institutional details that make up the financial markets with the theory of relative prices. Perhaps as a result of our procedures and the state of knowledge, our policy recommendations are often suggestions for pervasive changes in institutional arrangements. Many of our perennial policy debates are concerned with issues such as whether or not the Federal Reserve should be replaced by an immutable rule or whether banks should be prevented from independently creating money

IN the continuing debate about the role of money, credit, and monetary policy in our society, one of the major issues centers around the specific incidence of "tight money" on individual business firms. On the one hand, leading proponents of monetary controls as a regulatory device have emphasized the general, impersonal nature of such controls. They have argued that the impact of monetary policy is determined by the reaction of individual borrowers to changed market conditions.

Recently, in this REVIEW (J. K. Galbraith, "Market Structure and Stabilization Policy,this REVIEW, XXXIX (May 1957) I24-33) Professor Galbraith has asserted that in the case of monetary policy the "inflation can be controlled by denying credit to what are, in a general way, the least powerful firms" (page 132). Elsewhere, these least powerful firms are identified as the smaller firms (pages 131, 132, 133), and evidence concerning the distribution of bank loans by size is presented, to indicate that "while the case cannot be proven, there is a strong probability that in the last couple of years the effect of monetary policy has been to ration credit from all sources away from smaller firms in the competitive sector and to larger firms in the oligopolistic sector" (page 133).