What caused the financial crisis that is sweeping across the world? What keeps asset prices and lending depressed? What can be done to remedy matters? While it is too early to arrive at definite answers to these questions, it is certainly time to offer informed conjectures, and these are the...

We explore the connection between money, banks, and aggregate credit. We start with a simple real' model without money, where banks make loans repayable in goods and depositors hold claims on the bank payable on demand in goods. Aggregate production may be delayed in the economy. If so, we show...

Banks can fail either because they are insolvent or because an aggregate shortage of liquidity can render them insolvent. We show that bank failures can themselves cause liquidity shortages. The failure of some banks can then lead to a cascade of failures and a possible total meltdown of the...

Short-term borrowing has often been blamed for precipitating financial crises. We argue that while the empirical association between a financial institution's, or country's, short-term borrowing and susceptibility to crises may, in fact, exist, the direction of causality is often precisely the...

Both investors and borrowers are concerned about liquidity. Investors desire liquidity because they are uncertain about when they will want to eliminate their holding of a financial asset. Borrowers are concerned about liquidity because they are uncertain about their ability to continue to...

Banks finance illiquid assets with demandable deposits, which discipline bankers but expose them to damaging runs. Authorities may not want to stand by and watch banks collapse. However, unconstrained direct bailouts undermine the disciplinary role of deposits. Moreover, competition forces banks...

We develop a theory of how corporate lending and financial intermediation change based on the fundamentals of the firm and its environment. We focus on the interaction between the prospective net worth or liquidity of an industry and the firm’s internal governance or pledgeability. Variations...

Short-term borrowing has often been blamed for precipitating financial crises. We argue that while the empirical association between a financial institution's, or country's, short-term borrowing and susceptibility to crises may, in fact, exist, the direction of causality is often precisely the...

Banks can create liquidity because their deposits are fragile and prone to runs. Increased uncertainty can make deposits excessively fragile in which case there is a role for outside bank capital. Greater bank capital reduces liquidity creation by the bank but enables the bank to survive more...