In the 1983 paper cited as the basis for Bernanke’s Nobel award, the first footnote states: “I have received useful comments from too many people to list here by name, but I am grateful to each of them.” One of those unnamed commenters was Charles P. Kindleberger, who taught at MIT full time until mandatory […]
What follows is a Foreword I wrote for the Japanese translation of New Lombard Street, coming out later this year: The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-2009 served as the first real stress test of the global financial system we had been building over the preceding decades. I refer here to the market-based credit system […]
April 3, 2020 AC is of course After-Coronavirus, and we need to distinguish short run from long run. In the short run, the most important thing to keep in mind is the highly differentiated impact of the crisis, both health and economic. The virus has hit different countries at different times, so recovery will not […]
March 26, 2020 If your cash inflows disappear but your cash outflows remain, what do you do? Dash for cash. Sell what you can for what you can, max out your contractual credit lines, and hold the proceeds in spendable form. The idea is to buy time by finding a way to continue to meet […]
Much has changed in the institutional organization of money markets since Fall 2012 when INET filmed my course “Economics of Money and Banking”, but what strikes me most is how well the fundamental analytical structure has held up. The two ideas that I identify as central to the “money view”—the importance of the daily settlement […]
The following was inspired by my attendance at a recent conference, Money as a Democratic Medium, where I gave a short talk. The “Money View”, as regular readers of this blog will know, is my attempt to systematize a way of thinking that has a long history among practitioners, especially central bankers, but that has […]
Brine, Kevin R. and Mary Poovey. Finance in America, an unfinished story. University of Chicago Press, 2017. The authors of this book are respectively a non-academic Wall Street practitioner and a non-economist academic, but the text is nonetheless of considerable interest to economists and in particular to historians of economics since it represents an outsider […]
December 15 I attended INET’s day-long workshop on Secular Stagnation, and I meant to write about it at the time. But life intervened, then holidays, then the “bomb cyclone”, until this morning when Twitter drew my attention to the multiple sessions on the topic that are running this weekend at the annual ASSA meeting. Better […]
A 2017-end post with this title might be thought to focus on bitcoin, and I will indeed have something to say about that, but in my view the bitcoin bubble is mostly a symptom of deeper trends that need to be uncovered first. Today money is global, so we can start pulling the string anywhere […]
Proposals for monetary reform, whether mild or radical, are always and everywhere informed by some underlying theory of money. A week ago I spent two days talking with a group of technologists and lawyers–perhaps I should say digital coders and legal coders–and pressed them on this point. Chatham House rules prevent me from associating views […]