Somehow Perry Mehrling just died on Monday... after (careful out there @siggy47) a fall, of all things!
Perry Mehrling is one of those doldrum economists who you won't see or whose name won't be plastered all over the economics discipline... but from whom everyone who's anyone has learned a ton.
This is what I wrote/summarized in the grand guess-favorite-economist game we somehow stopped playing earlier this year (#1419510):
Mehrling: There are few other voices I'd go to for the plumbing of the financial system and how money works, not broadly or metaphysically or comprehensively like White, but in the here and now. Fiat behind the scenes. Like, where did Farrington learn some of the things in this great presentation? He probs read Mehrling. The book The New Lombard Street is fantastic, and Money and Empire from 2022 never got as much attention as it deserved... great story that mirrored the dollar system
Here's Nik Bhatia's tweet yesterday (there was also quite a bit of it in _Bitcoin Age_ #910275, #836070 #946402)
Cameron Harwick:
I've never published anything on Mehrling's two great books (Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System and The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort -- and an obscure one on Fisher Black), not because they're not worthy but because I could never make them work... too big, too overarching. (I do, however, have a shitton of notes from his books that I've never turned into anything.)
I can't recall the first time I heard of/learned of his work, but I started taking him seriously around 2021-22 when reading a lot of Zoltan Poszar's Credit Suisse notes/dispatch... insanely dense and complicated financial/money plumbing commentary, perfectly distilled and well analyzed. In my crowd of finance bros, these (proprietary) notes that Credit Suisse sent to clients were hard currency; we circulated them around with pride, bragging to one another that we found an issue, know a guy who could get us the "latest Zoltan"!
Here's Izabella Kaminska reflecting on the impact of Mehrling on her thinking and understanding of the monetary world ("a formidable monetary thinker")
"In fact, he was the first person I properly geeked out with about the rise of stablecoins and the fact they were akin to the second coming of eurodollars."
...and she credits/quotes from a new paper by Inaki Aldasoro of the BIS which just published an academic paper that draws extensively on Mehrling's work. (Reading the abstract, there's some Bitcoin angle to this so I will promise to delve into this paper... at some point -- the winter is long and dark and is almost upon us!)
[Banks] are not merely financial intermediaries that channel funds from savers to borrowers. They are issuers of liabilities that circulate as means of payment, and this distinguishes them from every other type of financial institution.
Really tragic news.
For Perry Mehrling. My respect for the man, my distance from the fed. May he rest in peace