Perry G. Mehrling 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. There, he taught courses on the economics of money and banking, the history of money and finance, and the financial dimensions of the U.S. retirement, health, and education systems. His most recent book is The New Lombard Street: How the Fed became the dealer of last resort (Princeton 2011). His best-known book Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance (Wiley 2005, 2012) has recently been released in a revised paperback edition. Currently, Prof. Mehrling directs the educational initiatives of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, one of which is his course Economics of Money and Banking, available on Coursera at www.coursera.org/course/money.
Perry G. Mehrling
By this expert
World Without Money Reconsidered
FT Alphaville has picked up on my friend James Sweeney’s latest, and since James cites the latest writings by other friends Zoltan Pozsar, Manmohan Singh, as well as my own most recent, the piece reads like a discussant’s comments on a shadow banking symposium.
Renminbi Swap Lines
Last week the central banks of China and Australia announced the creation of a $31bn currency swap line
Eurocrisis Redux
Entangling alliances or entangling leagues are nothing to the entanglements of cash owing—Keynes
Crisis Averted: Understanding LTRO2
Fundamentally, the ECB is trying to keep the ongoing sovereign debt crisis from turning into a full-fledged bank credit crisis.
Featuring this expert
Financial Fragility in a Network of Trade Credit

The physicist Sorin Solomon begins to feel dizzy when the economist Leanne Ussher talks econ lingo. Yet he listens, because the two of them have found a productive area of collaboration: some economic phenomena, they find, can be explained without recourse to the quirks that feed into human decision making.
Why Is There a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics?

The Nobel Memorial Prize defines high achievement in economics, and it validates the discipline’s claim for scientific authority. And yet, historically, it can be understood as a reflection of domestic policy conflicts in Sweden.
Banks: How Big Is too Big?

We all know it: The financial sector is bloated and banks are too big to fail. But just how bloated is it, and how much should it be shrunk?
How to Avoid Herding in Research

An individual fish reduces the danger to itself by swimming as close as possible to the center of the school. That is how schools hold together.