Perry Mehrling

Perry G. Mehrling was born on August 14, 1959. His place of birth has not been widely published. He attended Boston Latin School, the oldest public school in the United States, and graduated as valedictorian of the class of 1977.

He was a Harvard National Scholar and a National Merit Scholar, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Little else about his childhood or his parents has been made public.

At Harvard College, Mehrling majored not in economics but in Social Studies, an interdisciplinary program organized around the classic texts of social science, including Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Emile Durkheim. At the end of his junior year he resolved to specialize in economics, and within economics to focus on money, because treatises on money seemed to him the way economists did social theory. John Maynard Keynes's General Theory was the first such treatise he tackled.

He said he learned economics at the London School of Economics, where from 1981 to 1983 he earned an MSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics, supported by a Harry G. Johnson Studentship. His tutor Douglas Gale drew his attention to the so-called Hahn Problem, the fact that modern general equilibrium theory has no natural place for money, and that challenge shaped the next thirty years of his work. His thesis work under Meghnad Desai and Gale produced "A Classical Model of the Class Struggle: A Game-Theoretic Approach," published in the Journal of Political Economy in December 1986.

He returned to Harvard for his PhD in economics, winning the Allyn Young Teaching Prize in 1986 and serving as a dissertation research fellow at the Brookings Institution in 1986 and 1987.

Mehrling taught economics at Barnard College, Columbia University, for thirty years until 2017. In fall 1996 he began teaching "Economics of Money and Banking," and for fifteen years he used that course to work out his own theory of money. In fall 2012 the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) filmed the lectures, and in fall 2013 they launched on Coursera as a massive open online course that spread his ideas to a global audience.

In January 2018 he joined the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University as Professor of International Political Economy and a core faculty member of the Global Development Policy Center, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on global money. He also served on the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University and held visiting posts at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, the University of Nice, Paris X (Nanterre) and the MIT Sloan School of Management, and was a senior fellow at Boston University's Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law.

At INET he was an adviser from its early years, Director of Education Programs from 2012 to 2015, and later a member of its Academic Council. He was a central figure in INET's Young Scholars Initiative (YSI), which called him its father, and he regularly gave keynotes at YSI events such as its Money View Symposium. He also served the History of Economics Society as vice president in 2006 and 2007, and sat on the editorial board of Oeconomia and the advisory board of History of Political Economy.

The money view was Mehrling's name for his way of seeing the monetary and financial system. It links economics and finance by treating every institution, from households to central banks, in terms of its balance sheet, and by asking how payments are settled and how markets are made. It places liquidity, rather than solvency alone, at the center of analysis and gives a leading role to profit-seeking dealers who make markets.

In a 2015 blog post he identified three barriers people bring to the study of money: the "alchemy of banking," by which banks make loans by creating deposits; the "essential hybridity" of a system that is part private and part public; and the "inherent hierarchy" in which central bank money ranks above bank money and world reserve money sits above both. He described modern finance as money market funding of capital market lending, and with Zoltan Pozsar and others wrote on shadow banking, including the paper "Bagehot Was a Shadow Banker." Pozsar called the approach a view of monetary reality rather than monetary theory.

Mehrling wrote four sole-authored books: The Money Interest and the Public Interest: American Monetary Thought, 1920-1970 (Harvard University Press, 1997); Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance (Wiley, 2005), reviewed in The New York Times; The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort (Princeton University Press, 2011); and Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

His later papers included "On Par: A Money View of Stablecoin," published as a Bank for International Settlements working paper in November 2023, "The Minsky-Kindleberger Connection and the Making of Manias, Panics, and Crashes" in Oeconomia (2023), and "Challenging the Dance of Bailout and Austerity" in Finance and Society (2025). In January 2026 INET published his essay "Education of a Grandmaster."

He was a frequent guest on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, including a debate with Zoltan Pozsar on Bretton Woods 3.0, and appeared on podcasts such as Forward Guidance and Hidden Forces. He kept a long-running blog and wrote on X as @PMehrling, describing himself as a "proselytizer for the money view."

Mehrling was married. The History of Economics Society and INET extended condolences to his wife and extended family, but her name has not been made public in the tributes published so far.

Tyler Cowen, who was in the same Harvard class, recalled that the two spent a good deal of time talking economics together and were briefly bridge partners. Colleagues in the History of Economics Society remembered his off-conference "Keynes's Regret" dinners as a reminder that scholars meeting together are among friends.

Mehrling is remembered as one of the rare economists who could explain the plumbing of the financial system and also why it matters. His Coursera course and filmed lectures remain among the most widely recommended introductions to money and banking, and his ideas influenced central bankers, market practitioners and scholars working on shadow banking, the global dollar and the hierarchy of money.

The History of Economics Society called his books "indispensable contributions to the histories of monetary economics, financial economics, and international political economy." The Young Scholars Initiative said it would carry his legacy forward, and INET announced that it and YSI would organize a series of tributes to him over the following months.

His honors included the History of Economics Society Best Article prize in 2012 for "The Monetary Economics of Benjamin Graham: A Bridge Between Goods and Money?" (Journal of the History of Economic Thought, September 2011), a best-book award from the European Society for the History of Economic Thought in 2008, an invited plenary lecture at the History of Economics Society in 2005, the Johnson Distinguished Economist Lecture at Duke University in 2002, the Jerome Adolphe Blanqui Lecture in Prague in 2008, the Carpenter Lecture at Babson College in 2006, and the New Directions in Economics Lecture in 2010. As a student he received the Allyn Young Teaching Prize, the Harry G. Johnson Studentship and the Knox Memorial Fellowship.

Perry Mehrling died in October 2026 at the age of 67. According to the History of Economics Society, which said it learned the news from a close colleague at INET, he "died Monday night from injury sustained in a fall several days earlier." That Monday was October 12, 2026. The Young Scholars Initiative, posting on October 13, said he had passed away "this morning." Because the two accounts differ, People Forever records the month of his death rather than a specific day. The place of death has not been made public.

Tributes followed quickly from INET, YSI, the History of Economics Society and economists and writers around the world. INET said it would organize a series of tributes to him in the coming months.