Economics students are taught that banks lend money that comes from the deposits of their customers. In other words, banks just circulate money - passing it from those who save, to those who borrow. This, however, completely misunderstands how banks actually work: by creating new money when they give out loans. This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, however, was awarded, “for research on banks and financial crises”, to three economists whose models still understand banks, debt, and money as though they were naive economics students, argues Steve Keen. 

Fifteen years ago, when the Global Financial Crisis that I and a handful of other rebel economists had warned about began, I really thought there was a chance for a revolution in economics. In particular, mainstream economics had left the monetary system - that is, the banks and other institutions that support and regulate the creation and exchange of money - out of its macroeconomic models, on the assumption that money was just a “veil over barter” and should therefore be ignored in macroeconomics. In contrast, the contrarian theory I followed—known as Hyman Minsky’s “Financial Instability Hypothesis”—argued that private debt and credit (the annual change in debt) are crucial. As I put it in May 2007: