Perry Gandhi Mehrling received an A.B, a Ph.D. from Harvard University and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. Mehrling was valedictorian of the class of 1977 at Boston Latin School. He was a professor in the Economics Department at Barnard College/Columbia University for 30 years until 2017 and is the Director of Educational Programs at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a global not-for-profit organization dedicated to changing the way economics is currently taught. He teaches the hugely popular "Economics of Money and Banking" MOOC on the Coursera website.
Publications
Mehrling is the author of The Money Interest and the Public Interest: American Monetary Thought, 1920-1970 as well as a recent biography of Fischer Black, Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance.
Perry Mehrling's brainchild, the Money View, is a monetary-financial school of thought that links the intellectual realms of economics and finance. It offers an integrated approach for conceptualizing money, finance and banking, which it sees as the fundamental infrastructure of capitalism. Other than most economic theories, it denotes analytical importance to the notion of liquidity as well as to the centrality of profit-seeking dealers as market makers. The Money View has first been developed, formulated and put forward by Mehrling and is now - despite still being an academic minority view - popularized by scholars, central bankers and market practitioners around the world.
Description
The speciality of the Money View it its ability to adequately synthesize current features of our integrated monetary and financial system, which Mehrling describes as 'money market funding of capital market lending', a.k.a. shadow banking, by paying attention to both the money market and the capital market. The Money View includes elements of theories and insights by H.P. Minsky, Charles Kindleberger, Marcia Stigum, to name just a few.
Central institutions
Money, as a means of payment, to facilitate settlement. Credit, as a promise to pay. Finance, to facilitate valuation of promises to pay. Banking, as a means of allocation of credit.
Hierarchy of Money
Inspired by Minsky's Hierarchy of Money, the Money View recognizes the de facto inequality of economic agents or entire countries in their capacity to issue something called money. A privileged few at the top of the hierarchy may issue money while the rest can only issue mere promises to pay money, i.e. credit. The US dollar is at the top of the international hierarchy of money.
Politics
The Money View is inherently political. Its political dimensions are manifold and include the following:
a direct application of values the Enlightenment as a philosophical movement purports
critical thinking about the monetary-financial system
an emphasis on liquidity as compared to solvency
Epistemology
The Money View relies on comparatively few assumptions and uses reason as the primary source of knowledge. Generally, its analytical framework is based on viewing every monetary entity in terms of their stylized balance sheet, which serves as basic tools for asset-liability management, i.e. to measure sources and uses of funding. The Money View has been categorized by Zoltan Pozsar as 'monetary reality' because of its reliance on balance sheets and T-accounts.
