This sequel to Lucas and Sargent (1978) tells how equilibrium Markov processes underlie much applied dynamic economics today. It recalls how Robert E. Lucas Jr. saw Keynesian and rational expectations revolutions as interconnected transformations of economic theories and econometric practices. It describes rules that Lucas used to guide and constrain his research by restricting himself to equilibrium Markov processes and to conserving quantitative successes achieved by previous researchers, including those attained by quantitative Keynesian macroeconometric modelers.

We study optimal public portfolios in a class of macro-finance models that includes widely used specifications of households’ risk and liquidity preferences, market structures for financial assets, and trading frictions. An optimal portfolio hedges fluctuations in interest rates, primary surpluses, and income inequalities. We express an optimal portfolio in terms of statistics that are functions only of macro and financial market data. An application to US data shows that hedging interest rate risk plays a dominant role in shaping an optimal maturity structure of US government debt.

From a new data set, we infer time series of term structures of yields on U.S. federal bonds during the gold standard era from 1791–1933 and use our estimates to reassess historical narratives about how the United States expanded its fiscal capacity. We show that U.S. debt carried a default risk premium until the end of the nineteenth century, when it started being priced as an alternative safe asset to U.K. debt. During the Civil War, investors expected the United States to return to a gold standard so the federal government was able to borrow without facing denomination risk. After the introduction of the National Banking System, the slope of the yield curve switched from down to up and the premium on U.S. debt with maturity less than one year disappeared.