banks

We seem to be moving forward with this discussion on monetary policy, banking, and reserves. John Carney does a good job of summarising some of the initial forays in this back and forth. I am going to try my hand at framing the discussion…

In Paul Krugman’s view, banks are not very important since all they do is to intermediate between savers and investors, taking in deposits and packaging them into loans. Now, I know that Krugman’s own specialty is not money and banking, so…

The debate between Paul Krugman and my friend Steve Keen regarding how banks work (see here, here, here, and here) has caused me to revisit an old quote. Back in the 1990s I would use Krugman’s book, Peddling Prosperity (1995), in my…

Paul Krugman’s claim that those who argue banks play an essential role in macroeconomics are “Banking Mystics” has a natural riposte: Neoclassical economists like Krugman who believe that capitalism can be modelled without either money or…

Yesterday, John Carney at CNBC had a nice little post comparing Hyman Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis with some of the thinking by Friedrich von Hayek behind Austrian Business Cycle Theory. John rightly points to this passage as…

The following is the text of a ratings action on Portuguese banks initiated today

My view as developed in that post is that debt is central to understanding economic systems, and not just because it has a redistributive element in apportioning losses between creditors and debtors when recession forces credit writedowns.…

Alan Holmes wrote in 1969 that "in the real world, banks extend credit, creating deposits in the process, and look for the reserves later." Holmes would turn in his grave at Krugman’s naïve assertion, half a century later, that banks need…

Back in November last year I posted on my confusion over the jubilation shown by the citizens of Spain as they elected Mariano Rajoy as their new political leader. Mr Rajoy’s strategy during the election campaign was to say very little…

This is a thematic post, I am also putting outside the paywall because there is a lot of chatter today about Spain needing to tap EU bailout funds this year. The messaging in the analyst community follows the thematic prediction I made in…