Monetary Constitutionalism: Some Recent Developments

The volume edited by Leland Yeager more than 50 years ago and published in 1962 under the title In Search of a Monetary Constitution has turned out to be remarkably prescient since the Great Inflation was then about to begin. One might expect that in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis and Great Recession interest in monetary-constitutional matters would be revived and this has indeed been the case. In this paper an attempt is made to assess whether and to what extent scientific progress has been made in defining the nature and characteristics of a monetary constitution for the post-Crisis world. To that end some recent contributions to the literature are reviewed critically.