Meltzer'sHistory of the Federal Reserve
评述梅尔策的《美联储史》，强调央行独立性和经济理论对政策制定者行为的影响，指出政治与货币政策的互动问题无法一劳永逸解决，政策制定者常受错误理论支配。
among the central bank, the banking system and the non-bank public in causing variations in that crucial variable, the quantity of money.They shared Friedman=s view that, no matter how it got into circulation, the effects of money would often be very much the same, but they treated this as a conclusion to be established analytically, and in a way that would reveal when exceptions might arise, rather than as an hypothesis to be maintained pending its empirical refutation.Brunner and Meltzer also took a special interest in the effects of institutional constraints on the conduct of monetary policy, and in the influence on that conduct of beliefs about the way the economy works. 2 This book is, then, the product of a distinctive brand of monetarism, and represents an important extension of a research agenda that has been active for over three decades.It emphasises two overarching issues that are of great interest to modern monetary economists: central bank independence, and the role of economic theory in conditioning agents= behaviour.It also yields lessons that many will find unfamiliar.First, the Fed=s history makes it clear that problems arising from the interaction of politics with monetary policy are not of a sort that can be solved once and for all, for example by implementing the appropriate contract between the government and the central bank; rather, the challenge was (as it still is) to design institutions that are resilient enough to cope on an ongoing basis with the tensions these problems create.Secondly, and without denigrating the importance of the beliefs of the public at large, it is policy makers who hold the centre of the stage in Meltzer=s history, and he shows that their behaviour was often conditioned not by true economic theories, but by false theories that they believed to be true, that these theories often differed among policy makers at a particular moment, and that they changed over time too.In this essay, I shall discuss some highlights of Meltzer=s treatment of these two themes, and in the final substantive section, I shall take up what seems to me to be an important element 2 That interest may be seen as a particular example of their long-standing curiosity, reflected in a number of papers that they commissioned over the years for Carnegie-Rochester conferences, about how and why particular economic ideas become embedded in particular institutions and condition their activities for long periods of time.