Throughout this course, we're focused mainly on Keynesian Economics. Let's quickly discuss another model called the Monetarist Model. So the Monetarist Model argues that Keynesian Economics overstated the instability in the economy. Remember that Keynesian Economics focused on government intervention. Government intervention to fight inflation and to fight recessions as well. Right? Government intervention was always necessary, and they also thought that there were sticky wages and prices. However, the Monetarist models had a few different opinions. It was developed by Milton Friedman, who was a Nobel Prize-winning economist. He won a Nobel Prize around the 1970s, but he developed this theory in the 1940s. So the basis of monetarism is the primary focus on the money supply. Okay? They spend a lot of time thinking about the money supply. And remember, when we studied the money supply, this is controlled by the Fed, right? The Federal Reserve is the central bank in the United States and they control the money supply in the United States, okay? So, they didn't believe in this instability in the economy. They did believe that competitive markets led to a high degree of stability. So we didn't need so much intervention to keep the economy in check.
So the main thing with the monetarist model is the quantity theory of money. Okay? And we have a whole other video where we go a lot deeper into the quantity theory of money, and we'll talk about this in a lot more detail. So the quantity theory of money; it's a theory that connects the money supply with the level of prices. It basically holds the whole quantity theory of money as based on this formula right here:
M∙V=P∙TWhere:
- M = money supply,
- V = velocity of money,
- P = price level,
- T = real GDP.
The velocity of money, think about when you have a dollar and you spend that dollar. That same dollar gets spent again. You go to the store and you buy a soda with that dollar. The store takes it and puts it in the bank. The bank loans it to someone else. That same dollar goes through the system several times in a year, right? So that's the velocity of money. It's how often $1 gets spent; it changes hands over and over throughout the course of the year. Whereas the money supply is the number of dollars there are. So the number of dollars times how many times those dollars are spent, that's going to equal the price level, how much things cost times real GDP, what's being produced. Okay? So that's the whole theory, the quantity theory of money, that the monetarist model follows.
The monetarist model believes that the velocity of money is stable. So the velocity of money is thought to be pretty much always the same every year. They thought that the velocity of money was stable; each dollar gets spent the same amount of times year over year. So what they thought is by steadily increasing the money supply, they'll be able to increase real GDP. So real GDP will consistently grow with the increases in the money supply, it'll increase growth in spending and GDP. However, the monetarist model got a lot of hype and was used in the early 1980s and it influenced monetary policy quite a lot in that era. But during this era, inflation soared, and it led people to think that monetarism was flawed. So that's the main thing about the monetarist model, this quantity theory of money. We'll have another video where we discuss that. But for now, that's basically all we need to know about monetarism in this class. Alright? Let's go ahead and pause and we'll move on to the next video.