Banks and Finance in Modern Macroeconomics: A Historical Perspective
by Bruna Ingrao (Author), Claudio Sardoni (Author)

About the Author
Bruna Ingrao and Claudio Sardoni, Department of Social and Economic Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

About this book
In this significant new book, Bruna Ingrao and Claudio Sardoni emphasize the crucial importance of considering credit/debt relations and financial markets for a comprehensive understanding of the world in which we live.
The book offers both a thorough historical and theoretical reconstruction of how 20th century macroeconomics got (or did not get) to grips with the interactions between banks and financial markets, and the 'real' economy. It is split into two distinct and thematic parts to expose the different attitudes to banks and finance before and after the great depression of the 1930s. Part I explores the period from the turn of the 20th century to the late 1930s, when many important econo-mists devoted great attention to banks and credit relations in their explanations of the working of market economies. Part II discusses the post-war period up until the modern day, when banks and financial markets ceased to be a major concern of mainstream macroeconomics. The 2007-8 crisis gave rise to a renewed interest in credit relations, but many problems inherited from the past still remain open. The authors stress, in particular, the implications of the uneasy, if not impossible, coexistence of the endeavour to set macroeconomics within the framework of general equilibrium theory with the attempt to develop the analysis of the monetary and financial features of actual economies.
Macroecono-mists will greatly benefit from this timely book as it examines the historical evolution of the discipline, pointing out the major factors that have largely prevented the development of satisfactory analyses of the interrelations of credit, finance and the macroeconomy. Those involved in current economic policy debates will also benefit from the lessons offered in this book.

Brief contents
1 Introduction 1
PART I FROM THE 1920s TO THE EARLY POST-WAR PERIOD
2 Banks and the quantity theory: Wicksell and Fisher 24
3 Money and banking in the process of change: Schumpeter and Robertson 42
4 Banks, debt and deflation in the Great Depression 68
5 Keynes on banks in A Treatise, The General Theory and after 90
6 Further discussions and criticisms of Keynes’s General Theory 114
PART II FROM THE NEOCLASSICAL SYNTHESIS TO NEW KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS
7 Finance in macroeconomics in the post-war years: the Neoclassical Synthesis 140
8 The Monetarist counter-revolution: from the ‘resuscitation’ to the disappearance of money 180
9 Credit and finance in today’s mainstream 213
10 Conclusions 239
Bibliography 251
Index 273

Pages: 296 pages
Publisher: Edward Elgar Pub (March 29, 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1786431521
ISBN-13: 978-1786431523