Book Review Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit and Fixing Global Finance by Adair Turner

Abstract

Turner's book presents a new approach to monetary theory and policy. What's novel in Turner's book is not the proposition that can be dangerous, but that is what modern financial systems naturally create; and always to excess. Debt as an economic evil is an old characterization. Aristotle was sniffy about the money lenders, some of the world's major religions have prescribed or stigmatisedusury. And modern economic thinkers have denounced leverage just as sternly as the ancients. Irving Fisher saw the Great Depression as stemming from the curse of debt deflation. The shocking results of that 2008 failure meant that subsequently the authorities, quite rightly, did what they had to do to avoid a complete meltdown in the markets. But this book is not a memoir of his role in steering us through the financial crisis. Instead, he addresses deeper questions about what got us into such a mess in the fi rst place, and demolishes much of the conventional wisdom about the functioning of financial markets and monetary policy.