Tim Congdon's personal website

Thank you for visiting my personal website. The main aim of the website is to store, and to make generally available, my main writings in the last 40 or so years. Over that period I have been the most consistent advocate in the UK's public policy debates of the ideas that used to be known as "the Quantity Theory of Money", but in recent decades have been called "monetarism". Indeed, for much of my working lifetime I could reasonably be described as the UK's leading "monetarist" economist, and have received some applause and a lot of derision for taking this position. (I don't claim to be the UK's leading monetary economist, which is something quite different.)

This website - which is currently (2nd October, 2015) very much under construction - has articles and papers on economic subjects, but also on other preoccupations and activities. (See the separate website www.timcongdon4ukip.com for my writings on the single European currency and the European Union. I am a long-standing opponent of the UK's membership of the EU. I run a small economics consultancy, International Monetary Research Ltd. [ www.mv-pt.org ], which may also have useful content.) Your interest is much valued and appreciated, and I hope you find something worth looking at.

Professor Tim Congdon CBE, Director, Institute of International Monetary Research (www.mv-pt.org) at the University of Buckingham

P.S. I believe everything here is free for quotation, but - if you want to reproduce extensive bodies of material - you may need to go back to the original source.

The Quantity Theory of Money is, above all, a theory of the determination of the price level and the rate of change of prices. Its key proposition is that the rate of increase in prices (or "inflation") is roughly equal, over a medium run of several years or longer, to the rate of increase in the quantity of money less the trend rate of increase in output. From this proposition came the main policy message of "monetarism" in the policy debates of the 1970s and 1980s. This was that controlling and reducing the rate of money growth would curb double-digit annual rates of inflation, which were then found in the UK and many other advanced countries. Like a handful of other British economists, I was a strong supporter of this doctrine in the late 1970s and during the Thatcher premiership of 1979 - 90. I continue to believe that the "Thatcherite monetarism" of the early 1980s was vital to the subsequent defeat of inflation and to the UK's economic renaissance (relative to its main European competitors) over the last 25 years. (But I was appalled by the excessive money growth in the final years of the Lawson Chancellorship of 1983 - 89 and by the temporary upturn in inflation which followed.)

At a theoretical level, the main distinctive elements in my analytical approach are,

• An emphasis on broadly-defined money (i.e., an aggregate that includes all money balances) as the correct one in monetary analysis, and
• A belief that the impact of changes in money growth on the economy is registered first in asset markets (the markets for stocks and shares, and for property/real estate, both residential and commercial), and that only with lags do such changes affect the markets for goods and services, and labour, and so the prices of goods and services, and labour (i.e., inflation).