Since 1971, when the Bretton Woods gold exchange standard ended, the world has been on a fiat monetary regime, with various fiat currencies managed according to the discretion of the issuing country. Inherent in this regime is a basic problem--the ease with which the system lends itself to political manipulation. This study examines the emerging fiat regime in a world of nation states determined to preserve their sovereignty from erosion by the global economy and places this process in its economic, historical, and political perspective.

Today's banking systems, from the prosperous American economy to muddled Europe and wobbly Japan, may not be in as good shape as is generally assumed. Although, for instance, large financial institutions face the challenges of the new Euro with confidence, small and mid-sized banks are not as well prepared to deal with the world's changing financial scene. While most banks' profits continue to come from lending, many have become exposed to lesser borrowers, and others have entered businesses, such as asset management and trading, that could become less attractive. Given the pressure on...

Combining a rich mixture of technical economics, political repercussions, and even the psychology of symbols and beliefs, monetary problems are both fascinating and perplexing. Given the unprecedented fiat monetary regime currently emerging, past and present struggles for monetary supremacy provide valuable lessons. This book provides insight into monetary and political problems as they appear in past and ongoing struggles for monetary supremacy in the United States and elsewhere.

In effect, the issue is control over the stock of money. After examining such subjects as the failure of a...

This book puts forward the view that rational expectations have a key role in formulating economic policy and in determining economic activity, prices, interest rates, and employment rates. Arguing that economic policy crucially depends upon expectations about future government policies, the author supports his thesis by drawing on monetary theory as well as on the actual experiences of several post-World War II countries.

This volume demonstrates how monetary and financial organizations in the United States and abroad can be improved through a new addition to traditional monetary policy. Cooperation theory, a system developed from games theory, is shown to provide an appropriate action/reaction approach that can lead to cooperation without abandoning the free market. Institutional, theoretical, and empirical results of game theory, computer simulation, monetary theory, and policy analysis are woven together so that each reinforces the other. The text clearly stresses that although unilateral, noncooperative...

In his latest work, Macesich examines democracy and its economic counterpart, the free market, and the place of money (monetary and fiscal policy as controlled by the state bureaucracy) in such a system. DeTocqueville warned in the first half of the 19th century that democracy could falter as a consequence of citizens' diminished interest in restraining central authority. And now, there is evidence that vote-maximizing behavior of politicians and politically induced cycles in such key variables as inflation, unemployment, government transfers, taxes and monetary growth have become a...

A pioneering work in comparative monetary and financial studies, this is the first international comparative, empirical study of the money supply process (MSP) that involves all of the basic types of economies and institutional economic systems at all levels of economic development. As the authors note at the outset, the highly relative nature of the MSP contributes to wide differences in the MSP in different types of economies. Yet the MSP is one of the most important topics of both monetary theory and monetary practice. The comparative approach adopted here enables the authors to explain...

The constant and seemingly intractable problem of world debt is much in the news today, and, despite the Baker plan of the 1980s and the more recent Brady plan, the plight of third-world borrowing nations and their first-world creditors continues to worsen. Developing nations are stymied by the portions of their gross domestic product that must be given over to servicing debt, and money center banks continue to write down their third-world loans, damaging their own balance sheets as well as their credibility. In this study, a follow-up to his Monetary Reform and Cooperation Theory, George...

For Eastern European and other countries, market democracy offers an organizing principle for reform, a model on which to base movement toward a market economy. Macesich stresses the importance of such an organizing principle, asserting that without it the state will again assume dominance and the political and economic structure will be taken over by well-organized special interests to the detriment of the rest of society. In such a scenario, reform simply perpetuates the interests of the ever-active political elite and bureaucracy. Market democracy, the culmination of more than three...