Monetarist Interpretatons of the Great Depression: A Comment

Are the courses of fluctuations in economic activity and prices; entirely monetary, or entirely non-monetary? One has reason, to expect that the answer to that question has been so well understood for so long that it does not require a paper much less a book or a conference to report the answer. The earliest attempts at systematic thinking about fluctuations recognized wars, crop failures, plagues, weather and money—real and monetary shocks--as causes of fluctuations. Evidence supported this explanation. Although there was no single accepted formal theory of business cycle dynamics, few economists have argued that all fluctuations have a unique cause.