Zach Bethune

Thank you, Florin, for sharing this beautiful paper. What I will remember most about Perry, though, is that he eventually took a different road and the courage it took to do so. He had a Harvard PhD and a JPE paper. Everything was there for a conventional career in macroeconomics. Instead, he turned away from mathematical economics and read Bagehot, Hawtrey, Allyn Young, Hicks and Minsky, forgotten traditions of monetary thought that he brought back to life as what he called the money view. He later said he almost did not survive it. Most of his papers were rejected, and Barnard told him his record was not strong enough for tenure. He eventually got it for a book, The Money Interest and the Public Interest, in which he went looking for what he called his intellectual ancestors. Perry sometimes called himself, too modestly, a historian of economic thought. As Florin says, he remained to me an elegant and deep theorist even when not using mathematics, while now working in a direction orthogonal to most of the profession. I genuinely believe he had far more impact this way, and did more for our understanding of money, than he ever could have on the conventional path. He also made a choice that would be unusual today, spending much of his time building his synthesis in his money and banking course at Barnard, with his students. The course became a MOOC with close to 200,000 enrollments, and an eye-opener for many. I was one of them. I signed up while interning at the ECB as a PhD student, without expecting much. I was amazed by how much I learned. It was different from everything I had been taught, and complementary to it. I remember trying to follow the balance sheets of the shadow banking system he drew on the pixelated board, and the eureka moments when he had us look past the institutional details to the same economics of banking and central banking across countries and centuries. I remember him deciphering the euro crisis live. That course, and the reading that followed, shaped the monetary economist I became. Writing on repo, FX swaps and stablecoins, I have tried to understand shadow banking the way he taught us, as an ecosystem of interlocking balance sheets where heterogeneous institutions together transform liquidity exactly as a bank would. Almost every paper I have written starts with the balance sheets of the model. As always happens when someone you have learned so much from passes, I wish I had interacted with him more, and had been more explicit about what my work owes him. Perry found his intellectual ancestors in forgotten books. He is now one of mine, and I will do my best to carry the money view forward.