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The European Yearbook of International Economic Law 2022, edited by a group of experts, delves into the relationship between climate change and international economic law. The book contains 18 contributions from diverse academics, covering various topics such as constitutional law perspectives on climate action, climate litigation, climate finance, and regulatory innovations in the European Union. It also addresses the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war on climate change issues, climate obligations for states, and the reform of the investor-state dispute settlement regime. The volume explores the intersection of climate liability and international economic law, focusing on the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, Deforestation Regulation, and the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement. The contributors offer different perspectives, highlighting debates and challenges, while emphasizing the importance of effective climate action and the role of international economic law in supporting it. [Extracted from the article]

Scott Sumner's book, "The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Monetary Policy," provides an accessible introduction to his view of monetary theory, known as market monetarism. Sumner argues that the Great Recession was caused by a collapse in nominal GDP rather than a housing bubble, and he critiques the Keynesian explanation of the recession. He proposes the use of a nominal GDP futures market as a feedback mechanism for monetary policymakers. The book also covers topics such as interest rates, exchange rates, inflation, and the role of monetary policy in driving changes in nominal GDP. [Extracted from the article]

'Monetary policy in low financial development countries' is about a significant and evolving subject. Designing and implementing monetary policy is complex, and considering an economy's stage of development adds further problems. Theoretical advances are important alongside empirical analyses incorporating an economy's features. The book shows that the ground remains fertile for research on monetary policy in developing economies -ranging from the international transmission mechanism of monetary policy to central bank behaviour and communication strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a summary, analysis, and critique of John Smithin's recently published book Rethinking the Theory of Money, Credit, and Macroeconomics. The book can be viewed as Smithin's magnum opus. It focuses on how profits arise under capitalism and provides a sensible explanation in terms of money and the need to borrow. As with John's other writings, it provides deep insights into how capitalist economies work. It is also erudite and extremely well-written. On the other hand, I have concerns with some of the policy positions espoused in the book—controlling inflation via some monetary policy rule, opposition to the balanced budget multiplier, and how monetary policy can help with our contemporary distribution problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

James has written a fascinating history of the Bank of England during a tumultuous period of policy-making. It is organized around the theme of a "modern" central bank emerging from the ashes of failed monetarist and exchange rate targeting policies in the 1980s and early 1990s, as the United Kingdom transitioned (in 1997) to an autonomous Bank of England with a straightforward inflation target. Harold James, Making a modern central bank: the Bank of England 1979-2003: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2020. [Extracted from the article]

As I sat in the FOMC meeting on Tuesday, September 16, 2008, all I could think about was: where is FOMC Vice Chairman and New York Fed President Tim Geithner? As the Fed approached its Centennial Anniversary, many of the Fed's leaders forgot the Fed's first half-century of history. [Extracted from the article]

Global central banks are unwinding their balance sheets, flattening the yield curve, and inverting it; with global trade tensions, appreciating dollar (liabilities), and emerging capital market stress (bond sell off/capital outflows), the global economy is extremely fragile and could experience a financial crisis and recession by 2020 (the consensus is by 2021). Systemic fragility is caused by policy mistakes, made by central bankers. These decisions make the financial system more fragile, as current central bank ideologies and orthodoxy are deficient, and unorthodox. Central bank policies are making matters worse, by driving costs of capital to zero (negative), replacing real for financial assets, printing trillions to bail out banks, and purchasing bad debt and defective financial products, allowing massive leakage of capital to flow unregulated (shadow banking) across globe platforms, etc.; and all with no effect on real economic growth, wage growth, labor participation, inflation, and more importantly, standards of living and social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Curse of Cash, Rogoff (2016) makes two arguments. (i) Large denominations of currency are primarily used for illegal activity. Therefore, eliminating them would have benefits that far outweigh the costs in terms of lost seigniorage. (ii) The zero lower bound (ZLB) on the interest rate implied by the possibility of holding large amounts of currency is a costly constraint on central-bank policy. The best way to eliminate the ZLB is to eliminate all but small denominations of currency, ten dollars and lower, and to have those be in the form of coins. The style of the book, no models and no symbols, works fairly well for (i), but not so well for (ii). For (ii), the author is unclear about a crucial matter: what fiscal policy accompanies alternative interest-rate settings chosen by the central bank? (JEL E26, E42, E43, E52, E58, E62) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "The Monetary Approach to External Adjustment: A Case Study of Italy," by Giuseppe Tullio.

The article reviews the book "The Evolution of the International Monetary System 1945-77," by Brian Tew.

The article reviews the book "Rational Expectations and Monetary Policy," by Jac J. Sijben.

The article reviews the book "Domestic Monetary Management in Britain 1918-1938," by Susan Howson.

The article reviews the book "The Political Economy of Monetary Reform," edited by Robert Z. Aliber.

The article reviews the book "National Monetary Policies and International Financial Markets," by Richard J. Herring and Richard C. Marston.

The article reviews the book "Monetary Aggregates and Monetary Policy," by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The article reviews the book "Managing the Dollar" by Sherman J. Maisel.

Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? The title of this book by Peter Temin (W. W. Norton; New York: 1975) would seem to leave little to the imagination. In it Temin challenges the Friedman and Schwartz (F-S) interpretation of the causative link between changes in money and changes in interest rates and income that manifested themselves during the Great Depression—particularly in the years between 1929 and 1934. Correlation between money and spending is not questioned; the facts as recorded strongly confirm such an association. At major issue is the direction of causation: Did mismanagement of the monetary and banking systems by the Federal Reserve cause the catastrophic decline in spending and real income as F-S argue so forcefully? Or were the associated ills in the monetary and banking sectors reflections and ramifications of declines in spending and real income caused by complex independent real factors in the economy? Temin presents a case for this view and it is a good case, so his arguments must be treated with respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Monetary Theory and Monetary Policy in the 1970's," edited by G. Clayton, J.C. Gilbert, and R. Sedgwick.

The article reviews the book "Monetary Statistics or the United States: Estimates, Sources, Methods," by Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz.

The article reviews the book "Money," by Roy Harrod.

The article reviews the book "Remaking the International Monetary System: The Rio Agreement and Beyond," by Fritz Machlup.

The article reviews two books on economics, "Balance-of-Payments Policy," by B.J. Cohen, and "The International Monetary System," by Herbert G. Grubel.

The article reviews the book "Monetary Process and Policy: A Symposium," edited by George Horwich.

The article reviews the book "A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960," by Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz.

The main aim of Stefano Ugolini's book is to provide an overview of central banks, especially by focusing on the relations between monetary and fiscal policies and explaining the legitimacy of their existence from an evolutionary point of view. Based on the theoretical and historical evidence, we can conclude that functions performed by central banks are non-pre-determined outcomes of historical processes, that is to say, the emergence of central bank as a functional form is contingent to technical and political factors in the relevant historical contexts. The most important difference of Ugolini's approach is to take this functional point of view instead of an institutional one, the latter being taken by economists such as Goodhart and Giannini (both of them known to be opinion leaders on central bank research). [Extracted from the article]