Perry Mehrling | |
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Professor of International Political Economy at Boston University. the Pardee school of Global Studies | |
Personal details | |
Born | Perry G. Mehrling August 14, 1959 |
Alma mater | Harvard University (B.A., PhD) London School of Economics (MSc) |
Profession | Economist |
Perry G. Mehrling (born August 14, 1959) is professor of economics at Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He was professor of economics at Barnard College in New York City for 30 years. He specializes in the study of financial theory within the history of economics.
Perry Gandhi Mehrling received an A.B (magna cum laude), a Ph.D. from Harvard University and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. Mehrling was valedictorian of the class of 1977 at Boston Latin School. He was a professor in the Economics Department at Barnard College/Columbia University for 30 years until 2017 [1] and is the Director of Educational Programs at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, [2] a global not-for-profit organization dedicated to changing the way economics is currently taught. He teaches the hugely popular "Economics of Money and Banking" MOOC on the Coursera website. [3]
Mehrling is the author of Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System (2022), The Money Interest and the Public Interest: American Monetary Thought, 1920-1970, published in 1998, as well as a 2005 biography of Fischer Black, Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance. [4] In the wake of the 2008-2009 Financial Crisis, there was significant interest in his book
He wrote his thesis under Meghnad Desai and Douglas Gale at the London School of Economics. It was published by the University of Chicago's Journal of Political Economy. It synthesized differential game-theoretic models of capitalism, due to Kelvin Lancaster and Richard M. Goodwin. [5] Gale's general equilibrium handbooks on monetary economics acknowledge Merhling's assistance. [6]
Perry Mehrling's brainchild, the Money View, is a monetary-financial school of thought that links the (usually separate) intellectual realms of economics and finance. It offers an integrated approach for conceptualizing money, finance and (shadow) banking, which it sees as the fundamental infrastructure of capitalism. [7] Other than most economic theories, it denotes analytical importance to the notion of liquidity as well as to the centrality of profit-seeking dealers as market makers. [8] The Money View has first been developed, formulated and put forward by Mehrling and is now - despite still being an academic minority view - popularized by scholars, [9] [10] central bankers [11] and market practitioners [12] [13] around the world.
The speciality of the Money View is its ability to adequately synthesize current features of our integrated monetary and financial system, which Mehrling describes as 'money market funding of capital market lending', a.k.a. shadow banking, by paying attention to both the money market and the capital market.
The Money View includes elements of theories and insights by H.P. Minsky, Charles Kindleberger, Marcia Stigum, to name just a few.
Money, as a means of payment, to facilitate (final) settlement. Credit, as a promise to pay (money). Finance, to facilitate valuation of promises to pay. Banking, as a means of allocation of credit. [7]
Inspired by Minsky's Hierarchy of Money, the Money View recognizes the de facto inequality of economic agents or entire countries in their capacity to issue something called money. A privileged few at the top of the hierarchy may issue money while the rest can only issue mere promises to pay money, i.e. credit (further down the hierarchy). The US dollar is at the top of the international hierarchy of money.
The Money View is inherently political. Its political dimensions are manifold and include the following:
The Money View relies on comparatively few assumptions and uses reason as the primary source of knowledge. Generally, its analytical framework is based on viewing every monetary entity in terms of their stylized balance sheet, which serves as basic tools for asset-liability management, i.e. to measure sources and uses of funding.
The Money View has been categorized by Zoltan Pozsar as 'monetary reality' [15] (in contrast to monetary theory) because of its reliance on balance sheets and T-accounts.
Keynesian economics are the various macroeconomic theories and models of how aggregate demand strongly influences economic output and inflation. In the Keynesian view, aggregate demand does not necessarily equal the productive capacity of the economy. It is influenced by a host of factors that sometimes behave erratically and impact production, employment, and inflation.
Fischer Sheffey Black was an American economist, best known as one of the authors of the Black–Scholes equation.
An economic bubble is a period when current asset prices greatly exceed their intrinsic valuation, being the valuation that the underlying long-term fundamentals justify. Bubbles can be caused by overly optimistic projections about the scale and sustainability of growth, and/or by the belief that intrinsic valuation is no longer relevant when making an investment. They have appeared in most asset classes, including equities, commodities, real estate, and even esoteric assets. Bubbles usually form as a result of either excess liquidity in markets, and/or changed investor psychology. Large multi-asset bubbles, are attributed to central banking liquidity.
Monetary reform is any movement or theory that proposes a system of supplying money and financing the economy that is different from the current system.
Monetary economics is the branch of economics that studies the different theories of money: it provides a framework for analyzing money and considers its functions, and it considers how money can gain acceptance purely because of its convenience as a public good. The discipline has historically prefigured, and remains integrally linked to, macroeconomics. This branch also examines the effects of monetary systems, including regulation of money and associated financial institutions and international aspects.
Full-reserve banking is a system of banking where banks do not lend demand deposits and instead only lend from time deposits. It differs from fractional-reserve banking, in which banks may lend funds on deposit, while fully reserved banks would be required to keep the full amount of each customer's demand deposits in cash, available for immediate withdrawal.
A liquidity trap is a situation, described in Keynesian economics, in which, "after the rate of interest has fallen to a certain level, liquidity preference may become virtually absolute in the sense that almost everyone prefers holding cash rather than holding a debt which yields so low a rate of interest."
In public finance, a lender of last resort (LOLR) is the institution in a financial system that acts as the provider of liquidity to a financial institution which finds itself unable to obtain sufficient liquidity in the interbank lending market when other facilities or such sources have been exhausted. It is, in effect, a government guarantee to provide liquidity to financial institutions. Since the beginning of the 20th century, most central banks have been providers of lender of last resort facilities, and their functions usually also include ensuring liquidity in the financial market in general.
A financial crisis is any of a broad variety of situations in which some financial assets suddenly lose a large part of their nominal value. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many financial crises were associated with banking panics, and many recessions coincided with these panics. Other situations that are often called financial crises include stock market crashes and the bursting of other financial bubbles, currency crises, and sovereign defaults. Financial crises directly result in a loss of paper wealth but do not necessarily result in significant changes in the real economy.
George Selgin is an American economist. He is Senior Fellow and Director Emeritus of the Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, where he is editor-in-chief of the center's blog, Alt-M, Professor Emeritus of economics at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, and an associate editor of Econ Journal Watch. Selgin formerly taught at George Mason University, the University of Hong Kong, and West Virginia University.
Henry Calvert Simons was an American economist at the University of Chicago. A protégé of Frank Knight, his antitrust and monetarist models influenced the Chicago school of economics. He was a founding author of the Chicago plan for monetary reform that found broad support in the years following the 1930s Depression, which would have abolished the fractional-reserve banking system, which Simons viewed to be inherently unstable. This would have prevented unsecured bank credit from circulating as a "money substitute" in the financial system, and it would be replaced with money created by the government or central bank that would not be subject to bank runs.
Sho-Chieh Tsiang was a Chinese-American economist. He was born in China but resided primarily in the United States from 1949 until his death. He also resided in Taiwan in 1948 and in the 1980s.
Paul Davidson was an American macroeconomist who has been one of the leading spokesmen of the American branch of the post-Keynesian school in economics. He has actively intervened in important debates on economic policy from a position critical of mainstream economics.
Frank Horace Hahn FBA was a British economist whose work focused on general equilibrium theory, monetary theory, Keynesian economics and critique of monetarism. A famous problem of economic theory, the conditions under which money, which is intrinsically worthless, can have a positive value in a general equilibrium, is called "Hahn's problem" after him. One of Hahn's main abiding concerns was the understanding of Keynesian (Non-Walrasian) outcomes in general equilibrium situations.
Don Patinkin was an American-born Israeli monetary economist, and the President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
John Geanakoplos is an American economist, and the current James Tobin Professor of Economics at Yale University.
Duncan K. Foley is an American economist. He is the Leo Model Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Previously, he was Associate Professor of Economics at MIT and Stanford, and Professor of Economics at Columbia University. He has held visiting professorships at Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, UC Berkeley, and Dartmouth College, as well as the New School for Social Research.
Jagjit Singh Chadha (Punjabi: ਜਗਜੀਤ ਸਿੰਘ ਚਢਾ, born 1 December 1966 in West Yorkshire is a British economist who is the Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
Morris Albert Copeland was an American economist who criticized 20th-century macroeconomic theory, and who contributed to the development of modern flow of funds theory.
Tobias Adrian is a German and American economist who has been Financial Counsellor of the International Monetary Fund and Head of their Monetary and Capital Markets Department since 2017. He was previously employed at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he was a Senior Vice President and the Associate Director of the Research and Statistics Group. His research covers aspects of risk to the wider economy of developments in capital markets. His work has covered the global financial crisis, monetary policy transmission, and the yield curve.