The first section presents evidence documenting that the Federal Reserve did-for a while-genuinely use its money growth targets to conduct monetary policy, but eventually came to ignore the targets,even though the legislation calling for their use remained (and stillremains) in force.
The second section shows that the abandonment of money growth targets was a sensible response on the Federal Reserve's part to the collapse of prior empirical relationships between money and either output or prices.
The third section poses the question why these empirical money-output and money-price relationships disintegrated as they did, suggesting four different hypotheses with sharply differing policy implications.
The fourth section exploits a more structured analysis to test the three of these four hypotheses that cannot be immediately rejected by mere inspection of the relevant data. To anticipate, the evidence points mostly toward increased instability of money demand as the main reason why observed money growth lost its predictive content with respect to fluctuations of either output or prices, and therefore why targeting money growth became untenable as a way of conducting monetary policy.
The final section uses these conclusions to draw lessons about the likely usefulness of the current proposal to direct the Federal Reserve to follow a price stability target.