This review essay reviews the volume edited by Owen Humpage, Current Federal Reserve Policy under the Lens of Economic History: Essays to Commemorate the Federal Reserve System’s Centennial, and provides a broader perspective on central-banking issues. The papers in the Humpage volume address various aspects of central banking history, money, and private banking, with a focus on putting recent Fed policies in perspective. The topics covered include the role of the central bank as lender of last resort, the effects of open-market operations versus central-bank lending, central-bank independence, the political economy of monetary unions, financial crises, the effects of unconventional monetary policies, commodity monies, and the Canadian financial system as a natural experiment.

We develop a model of production and exchange with uncertainty concerning the quality of commodities and study the role of fiat money in ameliorating frictions caused by private information. The model is specified so that, without private information, only high-quality commodities are produced, and there is no welfare gain from using money. With private information, there can be equilibria (and sometimes multiple equilibria) where low-quality commodities are produced, and money can increase welfare. Money works by promoting useful production and exchange. In efficient monetary equilibria, agents adopt strategies that increase the probability of acquiring high-quality output.

A general equilibrium model of imperfectly competitive financial intermediaries is constructed and used to study the effects of some standard policy experiments. One-time increases in the growth rate and in the level of the stock of money have non-neutral (and sometimes surprising) effects on interest rates, the quantity of intermediated borrowing and lending, the number of intermediary firms, inflation and the price level. Optimal government macroeconomic policy is shown to reflect a tradeoff between public sector frictions and the capital market distortion created by increasing returns to scale and imperfect competition in private intermediation.

I. Introduction, 138. — II. A general equilibrium model of the growing low-income economy, 139. — III. The sources of growth paradox, 141. — IV. An analysis of the sources of growth paradox, 144. — V. Conclusion, 147.

T HIS paper examines the effects of debt management on aggregate expenditure during I9 53-58. The Treasury in this period lengthened the debt in recession and allowed it to shorten somewhat in prosperity (Table i), the opposite of the anti-cyclical policy advocated by some economists. Treasury policy was defended on the grounds that it did not unduly intensify recessions and that offerings of longterm securities in prosperity provided undesirable competition with new issues of private, state, and local government securities and increased interest costs.1 Debt management for purposes of this paper