The Liquidity Approach to Financial Crises1

The chapter focuses sharply on liquid assets, and is the heart of the book. It distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsic liquidity, centering on the latter. Extrinsic liquidity may break down on the spur of the moment and generate socially costly Liquidity Crunch. A substantive part of the chapter is devoted to discussing relative resilience of liquid assets, and focuses on Keynes's Price Theory of Money, the resilience of the US dollar, the weakness of bonds denominated in that currency, and of currencies of emerging-market economies. The chapter claims that recent financial crises can realistically be modeled as old-fashioned bank runs, and that assets' liquidity may be a function of policy. Special attention is paid to a phenomenon called Liquidity Deflation, which helps to rationalize Liquidity Trap as a consequence of loss of money liquidity rather than on the conventional explanation based on the infinite interest elasticity of money demand.