Bernanke and Kindleberger on financial crises, 1978–2003

Ben Bernanke and Charles Kindleberger both studied financial crises. One interpretation in monetary macroeconomics associates them over their endorsement of the credit view as opposed to the money view. We suggest another interpretation and compare their contributions on financial crises more closely. This comparison makes all the more sense as the two authors were engaged in a discussion that the literature has not studied in depth, but that forms the Ariadne’s thread of our investigation. We show that the difference did not so much concern the distinction between rationality and irrationality hypothesis, or between policy and market failure, as the distinction between exogeneity and endogeneity of financial crises. Bernanke rested on the assumption of any kind of exogenous shocks and studied their effects on credit intermediation, whereas Kindleberger analysed credit intermediation throughout the financial cycle and pointed out the causes of financial crises as the culmination of the endogenous process.