When Monnet started working on this research project in 2008, hardly any monetary historian displayed much interest in the postwar years—an epoch so strongly characterized by capital controls and “financial repression” that its study seemed to bear no relevance from a contemporary perspective. By the time Monnet had completed his Ph.D. in 2012, the world had changed completely: Post-crisis management had spectacularly widened the scale and scope of central banks’ interventions, and many started to wonder whether the high times of state control over the financial system were not about to return. Also thanks to this first-mover advantage, Monnet’s dissertation about France received considerable attention internationally and was awarded several prizes. Controlling Credit is a substantially revised and augmented version of that work; some of its chapters have already appeared in academic journals.
The book is fundamentally intended as a rehabilitation of credit policy. According to the pre-crisis consensus, monetary...