OPEN economy macroeconomics rose in fashion as the General Theory's jubilee neared. Perhaps no concern in open economy macroeconomics is more fashionable than international economic policy coordination, particularly if fashion is measured by the number of important conferences. An outstanding example of such is the June 1984 London conference jointly sponsored by the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the National Bureau of Economic Research. The proceedings of that conference are reported in Buiter and Marston (1985) which in turn provides the immediate impetus to this essay. This essay is not properly a review of that volume, however, but rather a response to a malaise reflected therein and obvious at other related conferences. Aside from a brief editors' introduction and concluding panel discussion by Richard N. Cooper, Michael J. Emerson, Louka T. Katseli, and Stephen Marris, the book consists of eight main papers with two comments on each. The main papers can be usefully separated into two groups: those dealing with international transmission and institutions and those utilizing a game-theoretic approach to analyze international coordination or its lack. W. Max Cordon exposits a graphical model to illustrate why coordinated expansion might be attractive to countries joined by floating exhange rates due to positive externalities in terms of output-inflation tradeoffs. Continuing their ongoing research on the implications of optimizing intertemporal models, Jacob A. Frankel and Assaf Razin demonstrate the theoretical ambiguity of whether the international transmission of fiscal policies is characterized by positive or negative transmission. In their model, whether a government spending increase is permanent or transitory, anticipated or unanticipated, as well as other factors, determines the direction of transmission. Patrick Minford presents and uses an early version of the Liverpool multilateral macroeconomic (simulation) model to analyze the effects of various government policies including most notably U.S. monetary and fiscal policy. In this preliminary version of the model, the builders' priors appear to play an unsurprisingly large role in determining the results obtained. Tomaso Padoa Schioppa demonstrates that the European Monetary System appears to have substantially increased the coordination of policies among its members and discusses the institutions which he believes