The economic crisis is also a crisis for economic theory. Most analyses of the evolution of the crisis invoke three themes, contagion, networks and trust, yet none of these play a major role in standard macroeconomic models. What is needed is a theory in which these aspects are central. The...

This article examines, in the light of recent events, the origins of the difficulties that current macroeconomic models have in encompassing the sort of sudden crisis which we are currently observing. The reasons for this are partly due to fundamental problems with the underlying General...