The Monetary Economy and the Economic Crisis

The monetary economy has properties that cannot be analyzed using the tools of today's dynamic general equilibrium analysis. Keynes's economics, far from being an aberration in the otherwise orderly evolution of modern macroeconomics from Adam Smith's ideas about the "invisible hand", was a major contribution to an ongoing tradition in monetary theory in whose creation Smith himself had played a part. Retrospective consideration of this tradition suggests that the property of the monetary economy critical to the generation of economic crises and the stagnation that follows them is its capacity to permit trading at "false" prices, a phenomenon ruled out by assumption in dynamic general equilibrium models. Not only Keynes's explanation of depression but also Hayek and Robertson's analysis of the role of unsustainable forced saving in the boom can be thought of as relying on this factor

Osman Bey's "The Conquest of the World by Jews" (1873): a Liberal Antisemitism?

The chapter traces the profile of Osman Bey (aka Frederick Millingen, 1836-1905?) an Englishmen who converted from Protestantism to Catholicism to Islam, and finally to Christian Orthodoxy. He fought in the Ottoman and Russian Army and became a self-taught social scientist and journalist. He was the author, inter-alia, of a pamphlet on the supposed historical and contemporary role of Jews in world and economic affairs. This pamphlet, "The Conquest of the World by Jews" (1873) was one of the sources of the infamous forgery the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (1903)