Wait, no, the velocity of money is low, stupid, did you see the FRED M1v graph? It's the supply shocks.
I'm looking for some reading recommendations of separate, competing viewpoints on general monetary policy written simply, so that I can read all arguments and the foundational principles of the different economic perspectives (Austrian school, monetarists and so forth), and ideally each item should be as convincing as the other.
Even better would be a book that encompasses this debate.
Thanks!
If you want a book that covers different views of monetary policy, you need a textbook that's likely to be math-heavy and assume a background in theory. Carl Walsh's Monetary Theory and Policy is good but hard.
If you want something readable, start with Friedman and Schwartz's The Great Contraction which deals with monetary issue around the Great Depression.
Barry Eichengreen did a good book with Globalizing Capital that deals with more recent times from a more Keynesian view. (I should say, Keynes himself was very readable and you can find seeds of Monetarism in the General Theory.)
The Austrians' economics is a lot more religious than rigorous (Hayek himself said he was wrong and Friedman was right about the Great Depression). If you want something well done and rigorous but very critical of the Fed through a libertarian lens, look to Allan Meltzer’s History of the Federal Reserve (the two volumes run about 1500 pages). You can probably sample chapters of it.
I never read his book, but Scott Sumner is one of the best economists in the market monetarist school of thought, and with its emphasis on nominal gdp targeting it very much cuts against the grain.
For other good, contemporary economists focusing on monetary policy: John Taylor, Stanley Fischer, and Ben Bernanke