Joseph Stiglitz writes:
This might seem obvious. But a focus on the provision of credit has neither been at the center of policy discourse nor of the standard macro-models. We have to shift our focus from money to credit. In any balance sheet, the two sides are usually going to be very highly correlated. But that is not always the case, particularly in the context of large economic perturbations. In these, we ought to be focusing on credit.
This approach should be obvious to bankers who stand astride the two sides of their balance sheet: loan assets (credit) and deposit liabilities (money). Deposit liabilities may at times grow faster than loan assets but not vice versa.
Read more at The Lessons of the North Atlantic Crisis for Economic Theory and Policy | iMFdirect – The IMF Blog.