Times change. When I was introduced to macroeconomics as a Princeton University freshman in 1963, fiscal policy and by that I mean discretionary fiscal stabilization policy was all the rage. The policy idea that would eventually become the Kennedy- Johnson tax cuts was the new, new thing. In those days, discussions of monetary policy often fell into the oh, by the way category, with a number of serious economists and others apparently believing that monetary policy was not a particularly useful tool for stabilization policy.1 The appropriate role for central bank policy was often said to be “accommodating” fiscal policy, which was cast in the lead role.2 Thus many people, probably including President Kennedy, thought that Walter Heller, who was then chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, was more instrumental to stabilization policy than William McChesney Martin, who was then chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Indeed, it was said that Kennedy only remembered that Martin was in charge of monetary policy by the fact that both words began with the letter M.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Princeton University, Department of Economics, Center for Economic Policy Studies. in its series Working Papers with number
102.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (David Long).
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Did you know? You can import bibliographic info in various formats into you bibliographic tool, or just into your word processor. See under "publisher info" on each abstract page.