Abstract

The Determinants of the Interest Level in the Federal Republic of Germany. Some remarks on a commentary

In this study it is shown that Gebauer’s criticism of the author’s theoreticalempirical work on determination of the interest level in the Federal Republic of Germany ıs essentially limited to the reiteration of theoretically unfounded conceptions of the German Bundesbank concerning monetary policy. Since Gebauer formulates no hypothesis of his own on the price-expectation effect, his regression analysis cannot refute the author’s results. Similarly, his empirical studies on the liquidity effect must be placed in the category of regressionism until such time as Gebauer presents a contradiction-free model of the effect of bank liquidity. In a simple credit market model the authors demonstrate that, in contrast to the variables such as the quantity of money and volume of credit used by the authors, the free liquidity reserves proposed by Gebauer cannot be used to determine the liquidity effect. With the same model, however, it can be demonstrated that, gauged by the signs of directional changes, the adjusted central bank money reserve introduced by Gebauer possesses the same qualities as changes in the quantity of money