Introduction: ‘cranks’ and ‘brave heretics’: rethinking money and banking after the Great Financial Crisis

Abstract

The history of capitalism may well be written as a chronicle of its recurrent monetary and financial crises which successively reopen unresolved debates on the nature and role of money. Indeed, it could be argued that of all capitalism’s constituent elements money has provoked the most protracted and contentious disputes. Perhaps this a consequence of the fact that the ubiquity of monetary crises and their consequences presents an obvious challenge to a tenet that the dominant schools of economic thought have stubbornly held for almost two hundred years – the “neutral veil” of money. Only when money is “disordered” does it have any significance for the proponents of orthodox “real” analysis ( Schumpeter 1994 [1954] : 277). However, if “disorder” becomes the norm it is increasingly difficult to deny the efficacy of money in the economic process. Although the neutrality of money is less widely pronounced and with less assurance than hitherto there is no sign of wholesale apostasy in the economic mainstream.

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