Money in the Great Recession

Book excerpt: No issue is more fundamental in contemporary macroeconomics than the causes of the recent Great Recession. The standard view is that the banks were to blame because they took on too much risk, ‘went bust’ and had to be bailed out by governments. But very few banks actually had losses in excess of their capital. The counter-argument presented in this stimulating new book is that the Great Recession was in fact caused by a collapse in the rate of change of the quantity of money. The book’s argument echoes that on the causes of the Great Depression made by Friedman and Schwartz in their classic book A Monetary History of the United States.