Perry Mehrling

My entire scholarly life has been about trying to understand money. That’s why I pursued advanced study of economics (MSc at LSE, PhD at Harvard), and that is the motivation for all of the books I have written since then.

My first book, The Money Interest and the Public Interest, American Monetary Thought 1920-1970 (Harvard 1997), identified an alternative tradition of monetary thought that emerged from American institutionalism. My second book, Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance (Wiley 2005), tells the story of the rise of modern finance, both as a set of ideas and as a set of institutions, that transformed the monetary landscape starting in about 1970. My third book, The New Lombard Street, How the Fed became the Dealer of Last Resort (Princeton 2011), retraces the chronology of the first two books but now as a story about the origin and development of the U.S. central bank.

My fourth book, Money and Empire, Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System (Cambridge 2022), now builds on all the previous ones. In the first place, it completes my money trilogy: history of money (Mehrling 1997), history of finance (Mehrling 2005), now history of international money. In the second place, it complements my “biography of the Fed” (Mehrling 2011), which focused on the domestic dollar, now with a biography of the international dollar, which grew up in parallel.

Everything I have learned about money I put into my courses, one of which was filmed in Fall 2012 and made into a top-rated MOOC on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking. My intellectual progress since then is recorded in various talks and papers posted on my website: https://sites.bu.edu/perry/. My current work is all concerned with extending this “money view” to the Global South, mostly visible as of yet only to the students in my courses at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University, where I have been teaching since January 2018. You can follow me on twitter @PMehrling.