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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Critical study of the quantity theory of money in the history of prices crisis

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The Quantity Theory of money which always links the increase in the high-Powered money supply and the general rise in prices is one of the oldest concepts in economics. After to have been the subject of many controversies at different times, it seems nowadays to hold less attention from the economists because the dispute is dissipated in a kind of religious choice to believe or not to believe to quantity theory. This theory officially influences the monetary policy of most of central banks in the world that bind conventional measures to control the money supply to curb inflation process. In many orthodox economics’ textbooks, the quantity theory is still deployed in perpetuum to explain the price crisis in history.By using the methods of political economy, we will counterbalance the economic facts like they are recorded and the economic theory; our thesis aims to provide a critical assessment of orthodox monetary doctrines based on the quantity theory, in the interpretation of historical price crises. Our approach relies on a factual reinterpretation of two major historical price crises in Europe, and we will seek to see if the quantity theory is relevant. Thereby, the “price revolution” of the sixteenth in Europe and the German hyperinflation are two periods of price crisis where the quantity theory is insufficient to explain all sides of the problem studied. Yet the quantity conception of money is much transformed over time, based each time on the doctrines of equilibrium and value. Our thesis is back critically in details on all aspects of this transformation: the contribution from the classics until the neoclassical School, all with a focus on the contribution of Keynes, to account for the long survival of quantity thinking in monetary economics.