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The Bank of Amsterdam is unlike modern central banks because it did not run a discount window, purchase government securities, or issue notes. Dutch authorities who opposed debasement created exchange banks such as the Bank of Amsterdam to guarantee the quality of coins. The history of debasement in the Dutch Republic is given.

The article presents the author's comments on the paper "Budget Constraints and Time-Series Evidence on Consumption," by Jordi Gali published in the December 1991 issue. The paper by Jordi Gali sought to test the implications of the consumer's intertemporal budget constraint for aggregate U.S. time series on consumption. Gali derived a number of results using a representative consumer model, and presented the results of econometric tests designed to exploit these results. The author contends that Gali's analysis suffers from an oversight that can lead to some ambiguity in the interpretation of the test results.