I had a curiously contrasting week. A few days ago, I attended a private conference organised by the Adam Smith Institute with Bob Hetzel, of the Richmond Fed. The following day I attended the annual Moody’s banking conference. Both events talked about the financial crisis and low interest rate environment, yet illustrated the huge gap between both worlds.
In his explanation of what went wrong in 2008/9, Bob Hetzel never mentioned the words ‘banks’ or ‘financial system’ even once (at least from what I can remember). Consumer demand, investment, liquidity, monetary policy, central banks were the terms used. This is typical. Too many economists nowadays seem to have forgotten that banks exist and that the traditional way of implementing monetary policy has been for central banks to deal with commercial banks (primary dealers, lending facilities…). Of course, the financial crisis also saw central banks use extraordinary measures by buying other…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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