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Were bankers the only culprits for the Great Recession of late 2008 and 2009? Were governments and politicians responsible to some extent? And did central banks and regulators make mistakes? Was the Great Recession, which had many echoes back to the Great Depression of 1929–33, attributable to the faults of free-market capitalism or blunders in public policy? Indeed, do economies with a privately owned, profit-motivated financial system have a systemic weakness? Do they suffer – intrinsically and inevitably – from extreme and unnecessary cyclical instability in demand, output and employment? Or were both the Great Depression and the Great Recession due to faulty public policies and misguided action by the state? These questions are some of the most contentious in contemporary economic debate. The purpose of the collection of essays in the current volume is to throw light on them both by identifying and analysing possible causes of the relatively recent Great Recession, and by comparing the intellectual response to the Great Recession with that to the Great Depression roughly 80 years earlier. The exercise is inherently problematic. A range of causal influences might be probed, at different levels of remoteness from the key events. For example, a valid and interesting approach would be to survey the macroeconomic ideas held by the principal decision-takers, and the development of their beliefs from the start of their careers. Such books as Ben Bernanke’s The Courage to Act, Mervyn King’s The End of Alchemy and Hank Paulson’s On the Brink do indeed give insights into the aetiology of the Great Recession.1 But they have not settled the issue of why so much, so quickly, went wrong in the main Western economies in late 2008. Inescapably, any approach has to be selective to some degree. The

Introduction: the quantity theory of money – why another restatement is needed, and why it matters to the debates on the Great Recession