Abstract
This book is about money, power and policy. Money is examined in various forms. Part of the study concerns that mystical quantity the money supply which, apparently invisible to mortal man, can only be imperfectly apprehended through a variety of indirect signs.1 Some plainer senses of money are also examined: money used (up to £3,000 million) to support collapsing banks and property companies in the middle of the 1970s; money lost (in excess of £300 million) by public institutions in that crisis; more money lost (£50 million and still rising) by the commercial clearing banks in the same affair.2
A notion prevails that the money market is something so impalpable that it can only be spoken of in very abstract words …. But I maintain that the Money Market is as concrete and real as anything else; that it can be described in as plain words; that it is the writer’s fault if what he says is not clear.*
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Notes and References
Measurement problems are summarised in M. J. Artis, ‘Monetary Policy — Part II’, in F. T. Blackaby (ed.), British Economic Policy 1960–74: Demand Management, students’ edition (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979) pp.258–303 (280–5);
Geoffrey E. J. Dennis, ‘Money Supply and its Control’, in W. J. P. Maunder (ed.), The British Economy in the 1970s (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1980) pp.35–60 (51–4).
The figures are derived from Margaret Reid, The Secondary Banking Crisis 1973–5 (London: Macmillan, 1982) pp. 190–2. The figure for public institutions is arrived at by adding her estimate of the Bank of England’s losses to those of the Crown Agents. The figure for the clearing banks is incomplete because the support operation is even now not finished. Problems of estimating losses are discussed in Chapter 5.
For instance Graham C. Hockley, Public Finance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) pp. 32–41.
Theodore J. Lowi, ‘Four Systems of Policy, Politics and Choice’, Public Administration Review, 32 (1972) pp. 298–310.
Notably David Gowland, Monetary Policy and Credit Control (London: Croom Helm, 1978)
K. K. Zawadzki, Competition and Credit Control (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981).
For balanced criticism see W. I. Jenkins, Policy Analysis (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1978) pp. 19–20 and 90–2;
Robert E. Goodin, ‘Rational Politicians and Rational Bureaucrats’, Public Administration, 60 (1982) pp. 23–41 (37) is more dismissive.
For a practical demonstration of exactly this point see William Greider, ‘The Education of David Stockman’, The Atlantic Monthly, December 1981, pp.27–54. (I owe this reference to Anthony King.)
The classic statements of intellectual complexity are H. A. Simon, ‘Theories of decision making in economics and behavioural science’, American Economic Review, 49 (1959) pp. 253–83;
Charles E. Lindblom, ‘The Science of “Muddling Through”’, Public Administration Review, 19 (1959) pp. 79–85.
A useful collection of papers is F. Castles et al (eds), Decisions, Organisations and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).
Todd R. La Porte (ed.), Organised Social Complexity: challenge to politics and policy (Princeton University Press, 1975).
A thorough study of the bureaucratic division of labour is Andrew Dunsire, Implementation in a Bureaucracy (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1978).
Harold Seidman, Politics, Position and Power, 2nd edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 190.
Anthony King, ‘Overload: Problems of Governing in the 1970s’ in F. F. Ridley (ed.), Studies in Politics (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) pp. 284–96;
Richard Rose and Guy Peters, Can Government Go Bankrupt? (London: Macmillan, 1979);
Richard Rose (ed.), Challenge to Governance: studies in overloaded polities (London: Sage, 1980).
This I take to be the lesson offered in the finest of all implementation studies: Jeffrey L. Pressman and Aaron B. Wildaysky, Implementation (London: University of California Press, 1973).
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© 1984 Michael Moran
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Moran, M. (1984). The Politics of Complexity. In: The Politics of Banking. Studies in Policy-Making. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04512-9_1
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