ABSTRACT

The mainstream approach has provided a fundamental intellectual foundation to the success of central banks in the practical task of maintaining price stability, at least in advanced countries. The fact that this has proven to be a useful analytical framework and that it has underpinned the Great Moderation does not imply, however, that all assumptions of the mainstream view are correct, nor that the underlying model is 'true'. The mainstream approach is that it assumes that the central bank is ultimately in control of the money supply and hence of the price level. One vocal supporter of the fiscal theory of the price level, John Cochrane at Stanford University, has argued that whether fiscal policy is active or passive has material consequences for the functioning of the standard New Keynesian model of the mainstream view. In fact, the effects of monetary policy shocks are more persistent in models with investment.