Today’s mainstream macroeconomics treats the economy “as if” always in equilibrium. Two older traditions, in this paper labelled Monetarism and the Wicksell Connection, argue that how agents gather information and apply it to the co-ordination of their activities are issues requiring attention before equilibrium can, or cannot, be assumed. They have explored the implications of this claim along different lines, however, with the former focusing on questions raised by the existence of monetary exchange in general and the latter concentrating on inter-temporal issues in particular. The resulting intellectual gap has persisted ever since Wicksell first opened it up: why?