درباره یک برنامه تحقیقاتی جدید بر روی 'بانکداری و اقتصاد - مفاهیم نظریه کمیت اعتباری برای پیشگیری و حل و فصل بانکداری و بحران بدهی

The financial crisis has triggered a new consensus among economists that it is necessary to include a banking sector in macroeconomic models. It is also necessary for the finance and banking literature to consider how best to incorporate systemic, macroeconomic feedbacks into its modelling of financial intermediation. Thus a new research programme on the link between banking and the economy is needed. This special issue is devoted to this theme. In this paper an overview of the issues and problems in the economics and finance literature is presented, and a concrete, simple approach is identified of how to incorporate banks into a macroeconomic model that solves many of these issues. The model distinguishes between the type of credit that boosts GDP and credit that is associated with asset prices and banking crises. The model is consistent with the empirical record. Some applications are discussed, namely the prediction and prevention of banking crises, implications for fiscal policy, and a solution to the European sovereign debt crisis that stimulates growth while avoiding the corner solutions of euro exit or fiscal union.

Since the outbreak of the financial crisis emanating from the US and UK in 2007 and 2008, macroeconomics has been the target of severe criticism.1 Thanks to the banking crisis, a broader spectrum of the public became aware of the fact that leading economic theories and models, as well as influential advanced textbooks in macroeconomics and monetary economics, did not feature money (e.g. Woodford, 2003), or banks (Walsh, 2003 and Woodford, 2003). In the UK in 2010, the most commonly used textbook in macroeconomics on MSc Economics programmes was that of Romer (2006), Advanced Macroeconomics. 2 On page 3, Romer explains that he is virtually not covering money in his book, because: “Incorporating money in models of growth would only obscure the analysis” (p. 3). Without money there is also no financial sector. Likewise, the hitherto popular DSGE models had not included a financial sector, a deficiency not easily remedied due to their particular methodology and assumptions. Economists have increasingly conceded that this state of affairs is unsatisfactory. Alan Greenspan confessed in 2008 that he recognised a ‘flaw’ in mainstream models (Congress, 2010). Simon Johnson (2009) of the Peterson Institute of International Economics concluded: “Whether or not our economies manage to avoid a major global depression, economics is in crisis. … [We need] to rethink a great deal about economics and how economies operate” ( Johnson, 2009). Donald Kohn (2009), as Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve, reflected the sense of embarrassment of the economics profession when having to admit to the public that most economic models simply assumed that banks did not exist: “It is fair to say … that the core macroeconomic modelling framework used at the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world has included, at best, only a limited role for … credit provision, and financial intermediation. … asset price movements and the feedback among those movements, credit supply, and economic activity were not well captured by the models used at most central banks.” These insights did not arrive a moment too early. Macroeconomics has experienced a number of major empirical challenges over the past 30 years or so, which have largely remained unaddressed by the mainstream literature. The time may now be ripe for a more fundamental rethink in order to address them. While economists seem to have taken the brunt of the public critique triggered by the crisis, researchers in the fields of banking and finance, often situated at business schools and supposedly more keenly interested in real world applications of their work, seem to have largely avoided criticism. However it could be argued that banking and finance research also failed in delivering prescriptions, tools and recommendations for appropriate regulation, supervision and risk management. While economists had dropped banking from their work, entire disciplines that focus almost exclusively on financial intermediaries exist. Why did they not warn about the looming banking crisis? Alan Greenspan said in 2008 that “modern risk management … the entire edifice … has collapsed” (Congress, 2010). Why did the apparently sophisticated approaches in risk management, portfolio optimisation and asset allocation seem of little help when the banking crisis struck? A fundamental problem seems to be the very separation of disciplines into economics on the one hand, with the potential to capture systemic and macroeconomic aspects, and finance and banking on the other, with the potential to model banks in detail. The separation allowed the systemic importance of banks to remain unnoticed: The economists have tended not to model the financial infrastructure and banking, and the finance and banking researchers have tended not to be concerned with macroeconomic effects of the collective behaviour of financial institutions. Focusing on microeconomic studies of representative financial institutions, they neglected the systemic effects of collective bank behaviour that may affect the entire economy and thus generate important feedback to banks. Both disciplines had developed in a way that blindsided them concerning banking crises. It could thus be said that economics needs more finance and banking, while finance and banking need more economics. A new interdisciplinary research programme on ‘banking and the economy’ is required, based on the inductive, empirically-based research methodology. This special issue is devoted to a first conference on this theme, the European Conference on Banking and the Economy (ECOBATE), held on 29 September 2011 at Winchester Guildhall, and organised by the Centre for Banking, Finance and Sustainable Development, University of Southampton Management School. This paper is meant as a call for such a new interdisciplinary research programme on banking and the economy. To illustrate the need and importance of this topic, I survey the state of modern macroeconomics, combined with commentary on relevant finance theory, and point out the many empirical challenges that need to be overcome. But to take the discussion a step further, I present an introduction to a concrete model linking banking and the economy via the reflection of a fundamental, yet usually neglected fact about banks of which both finance and economics experts are often unaware for the majority of their career: banks create the money supply through the process of ‘credit creation’. This topic is also the focus of the keynote address at the ECOBATE conference, by Lord Turner (2012--this issue), FSA Chairman. This special issue carries selected contributions to the conference. As there is also a need for a forum to discuss policy-focused papers, a selection of such contributions, including Lord Turner's, can be found in the policy section. In this paper I first discuss seven major empirical puzzles in macroeconomics and then a simple modification of the most basic macro model, the quantity equation, namely my Quantity Theory of Credit, which I first proposed 20 years ago. It enables the introduction of the banking sector into macroeconomic models and offers solutions to the puzzles. I next discuss the justification for this model and its empirical record. This is followed by an application of the model to current questions of how to prevent banking crises, how fiscal policy can be effective or ineffective depending on the role and contribution of the banking sector, and how to solve the European sovereign debt crisis.