Weighted Monetary Aggregates for the UK

At the conference in Oxford, Mississippi, it was tempting to locate the theme of the conference in the work of Oxford’s greatest son, and, indeed, one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. William Faulkner. It is clear that Faulkner was a student of the economies of inflation … Why else would he have written a book on ‘Soldiers’ Pay’? It could also be that he anticipated the demise of monetarism in ‘As I Lay Dying’, though this more likely to be an allusion to the Keynesian medium term (since we know what happens to Keynesians in the long run!). No doubt he had Divisia in mind as the ‘Intruder in the Dust’. As far as this chapter is concerned, we shall anticipate the comments of our discussants by suggesting the potential parallel between this and ‘The Sound and the Fury’. This is a story told through the eyes of several different characters, one of whom is a congenital idiot. We shall leave it to others to identify which of us is Benji. Our learned discussants would, no doubt, wish to complete the line in William Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, from which Faulkner drew his title: … ‘it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.