Abstract

The Supply of Money and Credit Policy: Critical Notes on the Monetary Conception of Claus Köhler

Recent intensive examination of monetary problems has brought a significant expansion of our knowledge of behaviour structures in the monetary sector and of the interaction of the monetary with the real sector as well as of the consequences of stability-policy operations of central agencies. However, the research results presented by a small group of American economists (the so-called monetarists) have so far gained only incomplete acceptance, or only the basic approach has been accepted, in the German-speaking world. One of the few attempts in the Federal Republic of Germany to develop a self-contained monetary and credit theory conception has been undertaken in the past few years by Claus Köhler and his co-workers. But Köhler’s conception, which was popularized to a high degree in the German-speaking world, adopts a standpoint that is intentionally opposed to that of the monetarists. This, and to no slight extent the fact that Köhler’s theoretical approach has become more and more the foundation for the activities of the Council of Experts, justify a systematic critical evaluation of his works and those of his former students. This evaluation has been based on the following system: 1. Analysis of the structure of the monetary sector, 2. Transmission of monetary impulses, and 3. Effect of monetary policy measures. The chief defect of the Köhler studies proved to be the lack of an overall model based on price theory that simultaneously covers the quantity of money, credit volume and the short and long term interest rates and unequivocally explains the transmission of policy impulses. Instead of such an analytical framework we find a large number of allusions to modalities and potentialities, and associatively interspersed, empirically often untenable statements which, in fact, are frequently reversed elsewhere. Such procedure gives the reader a leeway for subjective interpretation that is scarcely acceptable