ABSTRACT
The central problem for contemporary monetary theory, as Hicks came to see it, was that what had come to pass as Keynesian economics were also in effect much more Ricardo than Thornton-Mill, and some of the blame for that lay at the feet of Keynes himself. The central theme of Hicks' "key paper" is the historical emergence of a credit economy, already clearly apparent in the time of Ricardo, and the attempts by contemporaries to make sense of it. Keynes, for us, is too monetarist. Monetary theory becomes a sort of generalisation of banking theory”. The Keynesian revolution, as Hicks understood it, was in the first place about broadening the set of tools available for managing the system as a whole, specifically to include fiscal policy the better to ignite recovery in the context of sustained Depression. Hicks anticipated that this shift would have far-reaching consequences for the operation of the global credit economy, where there is the same problem of the instability of credit.
